Patent ID: 8078597

Claim:
A system for providing extensible controls for a communities framework, said system comprising: a computer that renders a portal including a plurality of portlets that provide access to a community framework, said community framework including at least one community of user members, wherein the user members share resources associated with the community; a repository containing data of said resources stored in nodes wherein each node has the data associated with a resource type, the resource type having one or more properties; a server that provides a content object class that is dynamically instantiated to form a runtime wrapper object that is associated with said node, wherein the runtime wrapper object defines the resource type associated with the node; an extensible control scoped to said community, the extensible control executing create, read, update and delete (CRUD) operations on at least one node stored in the repository by accessing the application programming interface (API) of said repository, wherein the extensible control is used to create both a new node in the repository and a new resource type within a single implementation, wherein the extensible control is annotated with a set of annotations to represent said properties of the new resource type and to create the runtime wrapper object that defines the new resource type upon node creation; and an extensible portlet of said plurality of portlets, said extensible portlet being rendered as part of said portal and being accessible by a user, wherein the extensible portlet is used to create new resources scoped to said community by invoking the extensible control to create new nodes and runtime wrapper objects associated with said nodes.