Chapter 1. Planning Your Portal

In this chapter, we will introduce you to the world's most popular open source portal product. You will get an overview of Liferay's architecture, features, and running environments. You will also learn to prepare the infrastructure for the installation of a Liferay Portal instance.

People use Liferay Portal to set up websites. You can see examples of Liferay Portal in action at the following sites:

• Cisco site (http://developer.cisco.com/web/cdc/home)

• Sesame Street site (http://www.sesamestreet.org/)

• AutoZone site (http://www.autozone.com/autozone/)

By mid-2011, Liferay Portal had been deployed 250,000 times all around the world.

In this book, we will walk through Liferay's functionalities by setting up a website using Liferay Portal. You will learn how Liferay Portal works and how you can take advantage of its features.

In the following sections, we will do some preparation for that website. We will talk about the following topics:

• Liferay Portal concepts

• Liferay architecture

• Pre-requisites for Liferay Portal installation

• Liferay Portal features

Let us get familiar with our chessboard first and then place the king, queen, rooks, and other pieces, before we start the game.