The HomePortals Framework

When you create a Site in ColdBricks, you are actually creating a full-featured Web Application, totally independent from ColdBricks. However, due to the architecture of this application, ColdBricks can still communicate with it and be used to manage it. These sites are built using the HomePortals Framework.HomePortals is an open source web applications framework designed specifically for creating modular websites.

You can find more about HomePortals, including developer's documentation at:

http://www.homeportals.net

Besides providing the structure, guidelines and libraries for web applications, HomePortals also acts as a "Runtime Engine". This means that the code that ultimately powers applications created using this framework is the HomePortals code itself. This type of architecture imposes some requirements (such as the HomePortals code must always be accessible) but also provides multiple benefits. In particular, and the one that allows ColdBricks to do what it does, is that HomePortals exposes a  common API to all HomePortals-based applications that provides external entities (such as ColdBricks) with a way to interact with the application. Using this API, ColdBricks can interact with the target application and provide a user-friendly way to manipulate all aspects of it without ColdBricks being actually part of the target site or application. Thus, the target application remains completely unaware of ColdBricks and the fact that it is being managed or edited by an external entity.

The following image provides a diagram of how all components relate to each other: