Chapter 1 introduces Liferay.

Chapter 2 discusses how to set up the home page and navigate the structure of the intranet.

Chapter 3 investigates security and access model. It describes how to bring to users in the portal: application of full access control security model; administration of users, user groups, organizations and locations; authentication of Liferay portals, and moreover, usage of security permissions and roles.

Chapter 4 describes discussion Forums. Message Board (discussion Forum) provides support for sticky posts, statistics, recent posts, RSS, email-based subscriptions, avatars, threads management, and full fine-grained permissions. Tagging system provides support to tag web content, documents, Message Board threads and more, and dynamically publish content by tags.

Chapter 5 describes Wikis. Liferay Wiki is a straightforward Wiki solution with categories; classic Wiki, HTML, or plain text modes; WYSIWYG editing; page history and versioning; and permissions. Moreover, the Web Form portlet allows a web administrator to define a form to be published in the website; the Polls portlet allows users or administrators to create multiple choice polls that keep track of votes and display results on the page.

Chapter 6 describes Internal Bloggings. Blogs provide features including RSS support, user and guest comments, brows-able categories, tags and labels, and an entry rating system; RSS portlet has subscription ability to frequently read RSS feeds from within the portal framework. Furthermore, WYSIWGs (What You See Is What You Get editors) edit web content, including Blogs’ content.

Chapter 7 introduces Shared Calendars. A calendar portlet provides the ability to display calendar information and to allow users to create, manage, and search for events. Workflow portlet provides the ability to manage instances and tasks, and furthermore, integrate with users, groups and roles. In addition, WSRP proxy portlet, IFrame portlet and Flash portlet are also included as well.

Chapter 8 investigates documents repositories. It does not only introduce document library, images gallery and content management including articles, templates and structure, but it also discusses content publication.

Chapter 9 presents chat and instant messaging. It first introduces chat portlet and its related features, such as AJAX and XMPP servers. Then it introduces mail portlet and its related features, such as IMAP. Finally, it briefly introduces SMS and the usage of SMS text messenger—sending SMS text messages.

Chapter 10 discusses others tools which would be useful to build a personalized web site.

Chapter 11 presents how to roll out to other teams. It principally introduces community administration, community virtual hosting, portal publishing and staging and a set of community tools.

Chapter 12 introduces search functionalities: OpenSearch, Journal content search, sitemaps protocol, Google search and Google maps.

Chapter 13 concludes the book. It mainly describes ongoing admin tasks, including admin portlet, enterprise admin portlet, managing password policies, updating the system–level settings, and monitoring users’ activities, and full integration approach to Liferay, Alfresco, LDAP and SSO.

This book uses Liferay portal version 4.4 and 5.0. with the following settings:

Optionally, you can also work in both Windows and Linux with the following settings:

You can use one of the following options for Servlet containers and full Java EE application servers to install Liferay Portal:

The applications servers (or Servlet containers) that Liferay Portal can run on include:

Databases that Liferay portal can run on include:

Operating systems that Liferay portal can run on include:

This book is for beginners to Liferay and “Do-It-Yourselfers” who want to develop a simple but powerful corporate Intranet. The book assumes technical confidence but does not require specialist administrator or developer skills.

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 are shown as follows: “We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive.”

A block of code will be set as follows:

<swimlane name="user_admin">
    <assignment class="com.liferay.jbpm.handler.
Identity Assignment Handler"
                                  config-type="field">
      <type>role</type>
      <companyId>liferay.com</companyId>
      <id>1001</id>

New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: “clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen”.

Note

Important notes appear in a box like this.

Note

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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