Preface
Liferay Portal is a leading horizontal portal product, written in Java. It has the power to provide the Intranets and Extranets of large corporations. Liferay will allow you to build your company's portal quickly, efficiently, and in a custom way to suit the needs of your corporation.
Liferay Beginner's Guide will show you how to set up your own site from scratch. Most books assume that you have knowledge of portals before working with Liferay and so include more theory than practice. However, only enthusiasm is required for reading this book as the step-by-step instructions, which follow the creation of a sample community site, will make it easy to install and configure Liferay, set up a Liferay Portal instance, and use the out-of-the-box portlets of Liferay.
By following the logical flow of the chapters and the creation of the sample site, you will set up your Liferay site in several quick and easy stages. You will start by installing Liferay in your application server or servlet container of choice. You will learn how to customize the look-and-feel of the portal, change the URL of the site, and create your own communities and organizations within the portal, then add users to them. By the end of the book, you will have a fully operational Liferay Portal and the confidence to maintain and customize it to meet your needs.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Planning Your Portal, gives an overview of Liferay Portal– the most popular open source portal framework. It briefly talks about Liferay's features and its portlets.
Chapter 2, Installing a Liferay Portal Instance, teaches you how to deploy Liferay in various application servers from a basic servlet container to an enterprise application server.
Chapter 3, Understanding Portal Basics and Theming, talks about the portal basics and portlet concepts. It also discusses Liferay User interface and use of dockbar to navigate in Liferay. It instructs on how to do basic administration in Liferay using Control Panel and different options of the Control Panel. It provides basic idea about the theme as well.
Chapter 4, Tips and Tricks—Advanced Configuration, discloses Liferay's secrets for tweaking the default behavior of portal by changing a set of properties.
Chapter 5, Building your First Liferay Site, here readers will start developing their first Liferay site. It discusses different components of the site and the approach to design the site. It talks about important concepts of Liferay such as Organization, Community, User Group, and page templates.
Chapter 6, Managing Pages, Users, and Permissions, helps the readers in learning about the concepts related to Liferay’s Page, User ,and Permission Management. It will also provide understanding of the various configuration options available for Pages, Users, and Permissions in Liferay.
Chapter 7, Creating and Publishing Content, the content management system and the web content management functionality are two interesting features of Liferay. Liferay's document library portlet allows users to upload documents in various formats. User can set permissions on folders and documents. Users can use the image gallery portlet to manage image files in the Liferay Portal. For web content management, Liferay has a web content portlet and a web content display portlet, which can be used to create and display journal articles.
This chapter will populate the public pages of the Guest community. It will show you how to create the Welcome page, Newcomers page, Lease office hours page, and Swimming pool hours page. We will welcome a user to our neighborhood in this chapter.
Chapter 8, Exploring Communities, helps readers to learn about various useful portlets required to build a site. This chapters covers quite a few out of box portlets such as Bookmark, Chat, OpensSocial, Language, Polls, Search. It also covers some of the custom portlets such as YouTube, SlideShow.
Chapter 9, Setting up an Online Shop, talks about how to set up online shop using the shopping portlet. It instructs reader on how to configure payment terms, shopping items, stock, and so on. It also instructs reader on how to manage orders and discounts. It also talks about end-to-end shopping workflow.
Chapter 10, Liferay Server Administration, instructs reader on how to user liferay's server administration features to maintain Liferay Portal server. It talks about server resource management, logging configuration, virtual host configuration, and so on. It also talks about how to configure staging environment.
Appendix A, PayPal Test Account Configuration, provides step-by-step guide to set up test accounts on PayPal’s sandbox environment.
Bonus Chapter, Exploring Social Collaboration, introduces you to the social functionalities of Liferay. Liferay has a blog portlet. A portal user can use it to post articles, which will be shared by the community members. Its calendar portlet can be used to create events, which will show for all community members. The wiki portlet allows a user to post his ideas. Liferay's message board portlet was used as a Liferay forum. This chapter will delve deeper into Liferay organizations. We will configure and use the message board portlet, wiki portlet and blogs portlet in this chapter.
You can download the Bonus Chapter from http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/Social_collaboration.pdf.
What you need for this book
The following are the software that you need for the Liferay Beginners Guide book:
JDK 1.6
Liferay Tomcat bundle – http://sourceforge.net/projects/lportal/files/Liferay%20Portal/6.0.6/liferay-portal-tomcat-6.0.6-20110225.zip/download
Liferay JBoss bundle – http://sourceforge.net/projects/lportal/files/Liferay%20Portal/6.0.6/liferay-portal-jboss-6.0.6-20110225.zip/download
Liferay Glassfish bundle – http://sourceforge.net/projects/lportal/files/Liferay%20Portal/6.0.6/liferay-portal-glassfish-6.0.6-20110225.zip/download
Liferay Portal WAR – http://sourceforge.net/projects/lportal/files/Liferay%20Portal/6.0.6/liferay-portal-6.0.6-20110225.war/download
Liferay Portal dependencies – http://sourceforge.net/projects/lportal/files/Liferay%20Portal/6.0.6/liferay-portal-dependencies-6.0.6-20110225.zip/download
Oracle WebLogic 10.3.4 – To be downloaded from the website
Apache Tomcat 6 – http://apache.mirrors.redwire.net/tomcat/tomcat-6/v6.0.33/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.33.exe
MySQL 5.1 community server – http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html
OpenOffice – http://download.openoffice.org/index.html
Who this book is for
All you need in order to benefit from the Liferay Beginner's Guide is programming experience. No prior knowledge of Liferay is required, although experienced Liferay portal programmers who need to get up to speed with its latest features will also find this book useful.
Conventions
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
Time for action – heading
Action 1
Action 2
Action 3
Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:
What just happened?
This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
Pop quiz – heading
These are short multiple choice questions intended to help you test your own understanding.
Have a go hero – heading
These set practical challenges and give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned.
You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: " It runs the Liferay.Widget function, which is defined in the widget.js file."
A block of code is set as follows:
<script src="http://neiborhood.cignex.com/html/js/liferay/widget.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
Liferay.Widget({ url: 'http://neiborhood.cignex.com/widget/web/neighborhood-exchange/special-days/-/8'});
</script>When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<script src="http://neiborhood.cignex.com/html/js/liferay/widget.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
Liferay.Widget({ url: 'http://neiborhood.cignex.com/widget/web/neighborhood-exchange/special-days/-/8'});
</script>New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "If user has enabled the Same as Billing checkbox, then the billing address and shipping address will be same."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
Reader feedback
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.
To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <feedback@packtpub.com>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.
If there is a book that you need and would like to see us publish, please send us a note in the SUGGEST A TITLE form on www.packtpub.com or e-mail <suggest@packtpub.com>.
If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.
Customer support
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
Downloading the example code for this book
You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.PacktPub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.PacktPub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.
Errata
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/support, selecting your book, clicking on the errata submission form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded on our website, or added to any list of existing errata, under the Errata section of that title. Any existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.
Piracy
Piracy of copyright material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works, in any form, on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.
Please contact us at <copyright@packtpub.com> with a link to the suspected pirated material.
We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.
Questions
You can contact us at <questions@packtpub.com> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.
