Finally got around to making our very first custom portal, the marxism portal. This was obviously inspired by the Wikipedia namespace of the same name, but we did it better because their portals come from the year 2006 and are not responsive.
As always in design, we have to ask who we design for and what they're looking for. Our portals could really help to centralize information that's naturally dispersed in wikis, but the difficult part is getting people to find it and browse it. First step should be to link it in the relevant pages that we link on the portal.
As for the answer, we think the portal is for newbies and what they're looking for is easily digestible and browsable information that essentially serves as a one-stop to learn about marxism. The content of the portal will likely change as we start to get a clearer answer to these questions (remember analyse -> iterate -> test -> do it again), but for now we at least have some content to show on this portal (linking to wiki pages). Down the line we could image making this portal into a simple marxism 101 course with original content instead of just linking to other pages. But at least we have v1 out.
Ultimately content in the portal will be static for the most part, I don't expect that it will change a lot. We just need to refine the role the portal serves and update it as we approach the answer.
Later we'll be able to look at making other portals for other topics, but for now we should focus on the marxism one so that we can also update the templates as needed before we roll them out too far.