With a fresh SVN head from last night, I tried creating a new instance of the CMSPortlet. But the same problem existed and preferences could not be updated. There was however one portlet instance preference which COULD be updated "NewsPortletInstance2". Here is the reason: If you look at the PORTLET_REF column in the JBP_INSTANCE table, you will see that all of the values are local.*.*Portlet, except for NewsPortletInstance2, which is local._1. There is a reference to the underscore issue in the JIRA bug referenced below. It turns out that if you look in portlet-samples.war/WEB-INF/portlet-instances.xml. NewsPortletInstance2 is the only one that has default preferences defined in the XML file. So the fix for the CMSPortlet was to edit the portal-core.war/WEB-INF/portlet-instances.xml, and add a preferences section, recreate the database and restart. | <deployment> | <instance> | <instance-id>CMSPortletInstance</instance-id> | <portlet-ref>CMSPortlet</portlet-ref> | <preferences> | <preference> | <name>indexpage</name> | <value>/default/index.html</value> | </preference> | </preferences> | </instance> | </deployment> | Now when looking at the JPB_INSTANCE table, the PORTLET_REF for CMSPortletInstance is local._2, and the preferences update worked. However this is more of a workaround. The real fix would be to change the code which is looking for the underscore. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3979383#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...