Book Image

Liferay User Interface Development

By : Jonas X. Yuan, Xinsheng Chen, Frank Yu
Book Image

Liferay User Interface Development

By: Jonas X. Yuan, Xinsheng Chen, Frank Yu

Overview of this book

<p>Liferay employs a specialized theming system, which allows you to change the look and feel of the user interfaces. As a developer, by using the right tools to create and manipulate themes with Liferay Portal, you can get your site to look any way you want it to; but the Liferay theming system can be difficult to get started with. This practical guide provides you with a well organized manual for working with Liferay as a programmer to help you get started.<br /><br />Liferay User Interface Development is a pioneer in explaining Liferay's powerful theming system by taking you through examples to get you to create your own themes as quickly as possible. It focuses on how portal pages are created and styled and also discusses some simple configuration and customization to change the look and feel of a portal page. Its explicit instructions are accompanied by plenty of source code. With the open source nature of Liferay, you will find a user-friendly environment to design themes with the latest user interface technologies.<br /><br />Liferay User Interface Development unlocks the potential of using Liferay as a framework to develop a rich user interface.</p> <p>The book starts off with how you should go about structuring a Liferay Portal web page. It identifies the components of a portal page: theme, layout, and portlets. This hands-on tutorial explains themes, portlets, and Alloy UI, which is the latest output from the Alloy Project of Liferay, in an easy-to-understand way. It covers all aspects of a theme from its inception and rendering through its consumption by an end user, with in-depth discussion.<br /><br />By the end of this book, you will clearly understand themes, layouts, and the Alloy API. Most importantly you will obtain the skills to write a theme and layout templates, apply them to a portal, and also control the portlet UI through different mechanisms.</p> <p>This clear, concise, and practical tutorial will ensure that you have developed skills to become a competent Liferay themer. The detailed text is accompanied with source code that allows you to play with the examples, update the code, and add custom features.</p>
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

Portlet UI customization

Liferay Portal provides some built-in features for users to configure the UI of portlets.

Portlet UI customization through configuration in chrome

The portlet chrome includes portlet name, icon for Look and Feel and Configuration, Minimize, Maximize, and Close icons. Only users with the appropriate permissions can see some or all of these icons.

The portlet name can be changed directly by users with appropriate permission. Users can go to Look and Feel page to enable/disable portlet borders, change text styles, background styles, border styles, margin and padding, and even apply custom CSS class names for this portlet instance.

Customization of Search Container

Liferay Search Container is a utility to display tabular data with built-in pagination. Some of the default settings in the Search Container can be configured in portal-ext.properties.

The following default property values can be reset to the available values for the number of entries to display per page. An...