System and method for providing extensible controls in a communities framework

A communities framework is disclosed which contains resources in a repository. The repository contains data stored in nodes wherein each node has data associated with a collaboration resource and each resource has a set of properties or attributes. A server can provide a content object for wrapping the node wherein the content object defines the type of resource contained by the data in the node. An extensible control is provided that performs operations on the node thereby providing an interface to manipulating the node's data. The extensible controls can allow developers to easily create new resources. A generic control can further wrap the extensible control and be adapted to provide an abstracted interface to the content object. An extensible portlet can implement the extensible controls in order to provide users with the ability to add new properties and edit existing properties of the resource.