Liferay is one of the leading enterprise open source portals and has been named the leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals too. Liferay Portal is so flexible that it is in high demand when it comes to enterprise portal solutions.
To develop an intranet portal for an enterprise, Liferay is one of the best open source portal development platforms that has a large-scale graph for the developer to extend any component. Liferay also provides best-in-class support for integration with other applications.
In this book, we have explained easy steps to develop intranet and extranet portals for an organization. You may be a new, experienced, or advanced user of Liferay: this book is organized in such a way that you'll find useful information to take away and apply it in your day-to-day work to develop portals. If you are a Liferay Portal administrator, you will find this book useful to maintain the portal server and keep it running smoothly.
This book covers Liferay features in detail, including new features of Liferay, such as Liferay Sync, Liferay Marketplace, Recycle Bin, Liferay Connected Services, Audience Targeting, and so on. This will help you to integrate Liferay with other key applications, such as LDAP, SSO, and Alfresco 4.x and above. This book has numerous practical examples that will help you to develop an intranet portal on the fly. Most importantly, after going through each chapter, you will be able to understand and develop an intranet portal on your own.
Integration between different applications, such as LDAP, SSO, and Liferay Social Office, with numerous illustrations, diagrams, clear step-by-step instructions, and practical examples with screenshots are provided.
By reading this book, you will understand Liferay and its advance features. There are numerous Tips and Notes to help you understand the discussed ideas better.
Chapter 1, Introducing Liferay for Your Intranet, provides an introduction to the Liferay Portal 6.2 architecture and framework and also briefly explains Liferay's out-of-the-box portlets and features.
Chapter 2, Setting Up a Home Page and Navigation Structure for the Intranet, provides the reader with detailed, step-by-step instructions for the installation of the Liferay Portal server. It also explains the navigation structure for the portal page and helps to understand the different controls/actions for making the portal work for an enterprise.
Chapter 3, Bringing in Users, teaches you the creation of users and managing the users in the portal. It explains different terms, such as Organization, Site, User Groups, and Roles, in brief. It also provides the steps to configure portal settings.
Chapter 4, Forums, Categorization, and Asset Publishing, provides a detailed explanation of forums (Message Boards), Categorization, Tags, and Asset Publisher. It takes you through the steps to create and manage forums. It also covers categorization and tagging to help you manage the content in your portal. Finally, it provides step-by-step instructions to configure Asset Publisher.
Chapter 5, Understanding Wikis, Dynamic Data Lists, and Polls, teaches you about the Wiki, Dynamic Data List, and Polls portlets. It helps you with the creation of a wiki page and also allows you to manage the wiki for the portal. It even teaches you how to create a dynamic data list for your departments. Finally, it briefs you how the Polls portlet works and how you can implement it in your intranet portal.
Chapter 6, Blogs, WYSIWYG Editors, and Social Networking, explains how to create and manage blogs in the intranet portal. It also explains the WYSIWYG editor features and helps you to configure a different look and feel for your intranet portal. This chapter also explains the social networking portlets available within Liferay and how you can make use of all the portlets in creating social networking integrations into your intranet portal.
Chapter 7, Understanding Sites, provides the detailed discussion on Site. It helps you understand the site and how you can manage the site with different settings and controls provided for the site administrator. This chapter describes the advanced settings for the site, such as Application Display Templates, Social Activity, Workflow configurations, and Mobile Device families.
Chapter 8, Document and Media Management, teaches you about documents and media in detail. Here, you will learn about all the features of documents and media and how you can implement it in your enterprise intranet portal. It briefs you on Liferay Sync, which allows you to sync the Liferay document and media files in your local filesystem and access them through mobile devices too.
Chapter 9, Web Content Management, briefs you about the web content management system. This chapter guides you in creating and managing the web content for your intranet portal. Its also covers advanced topics, such as the staging page and publication, which allows you to publish the ready page to live production after you have formatted it in the staging environment.
Chapter 10, Marketplace, Social Office, and Audience Targeting, provides a detailed discussion on Liferay Marketplace, Liferay Social Office, and Audience Targeting, which are new features provided by Liferay.
Chapter 11, Server Administration, teaches you about server and portal administration, performance tuning, Liferay Connected Services, and Liferay Clustering. This chapter will teach you how to manage the Liferay Portal server and manage multiple instances. You will learn about the custom fields and their creation. It will also take you through Liferay Connected Services, which helps you to monitor the server and keep an eye on any fix update from Liferay through https://lcs.liferay.com. You will also learn how to create clustering for your Liferay server instance. Finally, it will update you on the new features in Liferay 7.
Basically, to run the Liferay server, you need to have Java running on your local system. Secondly, you need to download Liferay Tomcat Server CE (liferay-portal-6.2-ce-ga2) from the SourceForge site http://sourceforge.net/projects/lportal/files/Liferay%20Portal/. Also, in your local system, you should have the MySQL database server running. For more details on the Liferay setup, refer to Chapter 2, Setting Up a Home Page and Navigation Structure for the Intranet.
Liferay Portal 6.2 Enterprise Intranets is for everyone who is interested in Liferay Portal. This book is for beginners, intermediate, and advanced portal developers who need to create enterprise intranet portals for the business. It will be handy for IT professionals who already know the concepts of portal technologies and need to learn advanced integrations for different open source technologies with Liferay. It is also useful for experienced Liferay Portal developers and Liferay architects as it explains the various technologies used in Liferay Portal.
In this book, you will 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, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Suppose we have a set of variables, where $PORTAL_VERSION represents the current portal version and $LIFERAY_PORTAL represents the working folder containing the portal that we are planning to install."
A block of code is set as follows:
terms.of.use.journal.article.group.id=$ARTICLE_GROUP_ID terms.of.use.journal.article.id=$ARTICLE_ID
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
permissions.checker=com.liferay.portal.security.permission.AdvancedPermissionCheckerAny command-line input or output is written as follows:
$LIFERAY_HOME=$LIFERAY_PORTAL/liferay-portal-$PORTAL_VERSION
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: "In the Liferay 6.2 control panel, under the Apps | Store link section, you will see apps that are stored in the Marketplace portlet."
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 <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.
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.
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.
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.
We also provide you a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. The color images will help you better understand the changes in the output. You can download this file from: https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/2841OS_Graphics.pdf.
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 could 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/submit-errata, 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 to our website or added to any list of existing errata under the Errata section of that title.
To view the previously submitted errata, go to https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/support and enter the name of the book in the search field. The required information will appear under the Errata section.
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 <[email protected]> with a link to the suspected pirated material.
We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.