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 and layout

A layout divides a portal page into several areas in Liferay portal. One or more portlets can be put in each area. As you can drag and drop a portlet to any area in a layout, you can change the user interface dynamically.

Tip

As a word of caution, layout may mean portal page in certain contexts in Liferay. That is why the layout database table contains all the data about a portal page in Liferay.

This is the benefit of a portal, or, Liferay portal: you can apply any layout to a page. Theoretically, you can put any portlet in any area of a layout. By drag-and-drop, you can change the outlook of your site in minutes, giving a surprise to frequent visitors to your site.

There are ten default layouts in Liferay portal, which basically meet the requirements for most pages in an enterprise portal. (Of course, you can also create your own layouts in Liferay.) The default layouts are:

  • Freeform
  • 1 Column
  • 2 Columns (50/50)
  • 2 Columns (30/70)
  • 2 Columns (70/30)
  • 3 Columns
  • 1-2 Columns (30/70)
  • 1...