Creating a new website with Liferay Portal - basic steps?

Question

I know this is not a programming issue, but programmers often have to do this work.

How to create a website using the Liferay portal - documents are very easy in this fundamental problem and all for version 4.4. I am using version 5.2 and the docs do not seem relevant.

Do you know what the basic steps are. So far I have logged in as a bruno user and can see the 7cogs website and edit it. But now I need to create my own website (for my company) and be able to develop portlets to add to parts of the page.

Further, I notice that the docs talk about working in Eclipse. If our website is static HTML (the reason why we want the lifelong lesson to be so that we can edit content elements with our content management tools), then will there be any need for Java dev, or it will all be dragged and clicked to install. Any recommendations would be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

Liferay can be used as a simple CMS without significant Java knowledge: creating, editing and positioning snippets of web content is drag'n'drop and using a built-in text editor. But to start using Liferay for your company, there are two main steps: the technical configuration (database, etc.) and the "look'n'feel" setting.

Technical part

First of all, you should get rid of the 7cogs website: this is called a hook in the Liferay wording. To do this, if you are using Tomcat for the application server, simply delete the 7cogs directory as indicated here . Now you can create a configuration file for your installation: this is a simple text properties file called portal -ext.properties and is placed in the webapps / ROOT / WEB-INF / classes folder of your tomcat installation. This file handles most of the Liferay portal configuration, for example:

• your company name
• if you want to display the terms of use page at the first login
• if you want someone to be able to create an account on your portal
• database in which data will be stored

To do this, the properties in the -ext.properties portal override the default properties found in the built-in portal.properties file located in the jar file of the impl-jar file in the webapps / ROOT / WEB-INF / lib directory. Just unzip the jar file to a temporary folder to access the portal.properties file.

Example portal-ext.properties file:

company.default.web.id=yourcompany.com terms.of.use.required=false company.security.strangers=false jdbc.default.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver jdbc.default.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/lportal?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8&useFastDateParsing=false jdbc.default.username=root jdbc.default.password=root 

After that, you can start your application server. As the default administrator (with the name test, which you can change in the portal-ext.properties file) you can access the centralized web-based control center located in the "dock" (a strange menu with the inscription "Welcome Test" in the upper right part of any page after logging in). I would advise you to read the administration guide useful for most administrative tasks.

Part of Branding

Liferay uses Themes to automatically decorate portal pages (logo, navigation, portlet borders ...) using images, CSS, Javascript (JQuery), and the Velocity template language. Themes are included in the .war file as a standard web application and are deployed on the fly either through the control center or by deleting the file in the server deployment directory. Liferay can use several topics at the same time, one for each community (group of pages, users and content), for example. After that, you can create your own theme using the Plugins SDK .

Wikis , forums and blogs can be very helpful.