Displaying built in Modules to customer-self-service

Question

I've trying to display a built-in module (like contacts, accounts, etc..) to the customer support portal. I'm not sure if I should treat it like a custom module (not really any functionality to it). 
 What I have tried: 
 Editing the self-service role updating the permissions for the role that is assigned to our Portal users. In Admin > Role Management -> Customer Self Service Portal role. and setting the following permission to display the module: 
 
 Access - Enabled 
 Access Type - Normal 
 List - All 
 View - All 
 
 And after that, when i go to the Admin > Sugar Portal > Configure Portal . There are no hidden modules for me to put in the Displayed Modules list... 
 Expected output: 
 Displaying the account module with the contacts corresponding to the account so the customer can see/edit his/her account and contact info. 
 
 Should I edit the vardef file to make a module visible in the sugar customer portal?

Karen Escritorio · Answer

Hi Karen, 
 First of all, I would direct you to read this article and the comments as well before proceeding further: https://sugarclub.sugarcrm.com/dev-club/b/dev-blog/posts/adding-a-custom-module-to-the-customer-portal 
 
 In short, I want to point out a couple of specific parts which should be clarified of your points: 
 - The portal needs to know which records the specific portal user (contact) can or cannot see, and that is something that needs to be thought through carefully as you would not want to risk to expose more data than you should, to a customer. That's where the vardefs and potentially a custom visibility come into play 
 - The portal needs the portal platform's views for the module you want to enable (list and record as a minimum) 
 - The portal normally only allows for creation and not record editing, if you want to change this behaviour, it is a somewhat deep customisation 
 If you do want to dig deeper into extending/overriding and in general customising the portal behaviour, I suggest you have a look at "data/visibility/portal/", "src/Portal/", " client/portal/api/ModulePortalApi.php ", "data/acl/SugarACLPortal.php", every module's "portal_visibility" section within the vardefs and finally portal specific views to start with. 
 Every portal component is now extensible leveraging the custom directory (so do not attempt to modify any core files). 
 Hope this helps you towards the right direction!