hi, i wanted to know what is the best open source portal server, i have tried exo, liferay & pluto but all have their own problems, i think they are really far from commertial use and very hard to work with.

i think they are really far from commertial use and very hard to work with.

I think that it is fair to say that most commercial portal servers are hard to work with and have their own problems too. I have looked into Liferay, which has been deployed into production and seem to have a lot of support from the community (there are several discussions on serverside). They also have the best documentation that I have seen for installing and customization.

And from the research that I have done, if you are looking for open source, you named the leaders of the pack. The only other one that I work recommend looking into is JetSpeed2 from Apache.

At least with Open Source solutions, you can fix the problems that you encounter.

It doesn't matter which one you pick, you're locking yourself into a standards battle between vendors: do they support JSR168 or some flavor of it? WS and BEA have their own IDE and deployment processes and the open source projects have their own as well...

I've been at companies that have paid the big bucks and really didn't do more than display JSP files in the portlets, no log in, no sign-on, no custom content; might as well just had a bunch of HTML pages, but hey, we paid for a portal!