Yep, I'm just in the midst of setting up a university portal with uPortal and boy does it suck monkey balls!

It's totally all right if you don't really need to change anything more than the colours and perhaps add some logos, but if you need anything custom-done, you'll basically have to hack and slash in the middle of the codebase.

We're stuck with a uPortal 2.1 implementation, because it would be insanely costly to migrate the custom changes we had to make to 2.3.

This is my first project in academia and has made me slightly ashamed of myself as a professional.