A community that is accessed via a portal is disclosed, for maintaining user membership during collaboration on a project. A repository containing resources is provided wherein the data is stored nodes and each node is associated with a collaboration resource. The resources can each have a set of properties or attributes. A content object can be provided for wrapping each node and for specifying what type of resource the node holds data for. A generic control can be implemented in order to handle various business logic for the developer in terms of the collaboration resources. The generic control can deal with the content object wrappers instead of nodes. Developers can use the generic controls in order to obtain an abstracted interface to the content management system API. The generic control can also contain an extensible control for performing CRUD operations on the data nodes.