Each gear will be administered by a portal administrator—usually an IT employee who will install and configure the gear. All gear instances will also have community leaders. A community leader could be the same person as the portal administrator, but will frequently be someone different.

Gears will need to have administrative views appropriate to their various administrative levels (community leader and user, for example). All administrative views have a full-page display mode. In our discussion gear example, the gear might have an edit link that opens a screen, allowing users to determine which discussion boards appear on the page. In addition, the community leader might have access to an instance configuration page, as well as to a settings page for the entire community.

In planning and developing your gears, it is important to determine what customizations will need to be available at each level (portal administrator, community leader, end-user, etc.) and to design pages to accommodate these customizations.

For additional information on forms and form handling for gears, refer to the Form Handling section of the Gears and the Portal Application Framework chapter of this manual and the Gear Configuration Page Fragments section of the Creating Gear Page Fragments chapter. For additional information on forms and form handling, refer to the Creating Forms chapter of the Page Developer's Guide and the Working with Forms and Form Handlers chapter of the Platform Programming Guide.