Customizing Liferay Portal for Business

Needs

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@shubhamnagar

Director – InfoAxon Technologies

Discussion Points

Live Demo Action

Brief Introduction

about Liferay Understanding Liferay

Customization Scenarios Environments,

Tools &

Techniques

needed

Key Customization

Approaches

Liferay – A Brief Introduction

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Horizontal Portal Platform to Develop “Web Experiences”

Enterprise Application Integration Platform

“Container” for Web platform and diverse experiences such as BI Dashboards, Big Data portals

Simple Web Site with CMS and Collaboration

Employee Intranet & Extranet Platform

Extended Enterprise Service Platforms

Web Content Management Platform

Online Community Centric Social Network Platform

Open Source

with Liferay

CE and

Liferay EE

100’s of

“Application

Portlets” to

build Web

Experience

Extensive

Open

Standards

Support

Rich

Integration

and Web UI

Support

Rich

Security

Features

Setting Context to Liferay Customization

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Content Centric Platform

•Ranging from simple web site to content centric portals.

•E.g. news sites, reports, documents, information platforms

•Less integration with other enterprise systems

Intranet Collaboration

Platforms

•Employees connect and share information

•Typical Intranet applications

•Rich in Social and Collaborative Feel

•Enterprise Social Networks

Extranet Extended Enterprise Service

Platforms

•Limited Content BUT more dynamic web applications

•Services exposed to vendors, customers, partners

•Provides “Back end” Services to other web interfaces

Integration Platform

•Liferay used more as Container

•Brings existing services, data, content from other sources

•Renders Web applications by calling services to other systems

Customization defined by “Character” of the Portal Platform

Environment, Tools and

Techniques for Liferay

Customization

Setup of required environment, tool kits and techniques or

development approach to help customize Liferay for your Business

Needs

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Customization Environment

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Plugins SDK

• Command Line Based Environment

• Uses Apache Ant or Maven

• Generates a Skeleton Project

• Location for Customized Project

• Used for Portlets, Theme Development

Liferay IDE

• Uses Plugins SDK

• Available as:

• Extension of Eclipse IDE for Liferay

• Bundled with Liferay Developer Studio

• For Development using CE and EE versions

Liferay Developer Studio

• Pre-Bundled version of Plugins SDK and Liferay IDE

• Mainly used for Liferay Enterprise Development

Key Customization Decisions

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Information Architecture

Taxonomy Hierarchy (or

not) Categorization

Pre-defined Tags

Content Assets Structure Templates

Sites Private or

Public Sites Single or

Multiple Sites Personalization Site Templates

Role and Authentication

Organizational Structure

Roles & Permissions

Identity Integrations

Portlets and Applications

Reuse Analysis New Dynamic

Apps External App Integrations

Theme & Look and Feel

UI Design Navigational

Model Usability Patterns

Page Templates & Layout

Scenario – Content Centric Platform

Example: Content Rich site with different

content types

Collaboration used to share content and

interact around content

Focus: Basic Customization Techniques and

Methodology to adopt

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Information Architecture

Creating the right information architecture for your Business

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Top Level Navigation

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Vocabularies and Tags

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Content

In most cases it’s the content that drives usability and UI

decisions

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Content Publishing

Separate Basic

Content

• Simple Web Page

Articles

• Documents

• Media

Identify “Structured”

Content

Identify “Content

Types”

• FAQs

• HOW TO’s

• Guides

• KB Article

• Glossary

• Updates

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Publish Basic Web Content

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Define Content Structure for

New Content Types

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Define New Content Items

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Define Templates

Templates are scripts that tell Liferay how to

display content in the structure

Use your favorite script method (CSS, FTL,

Velocity Macros, XSL)

Each Structure is actually a XML document that

gets “Transformed” using above methods

resulting in dynamic HTML

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Sites and Organizations

Determine the overall Site Architecture for your solution

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Sites

Sites are “Content and Collaboration Spaces”

visualized for your business.

Each Site will have Its own

• Set of public and private pages

• Page Templates

• Branding

• Members

• Content

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Site Creation

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Organization and Users

Optionally make an Organization

Populates Users to Organization

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Roles and Identity Integrations

Define Roles for your overall solution and create user identity

integrations if required

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Roles

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Identity Integrations

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Workflows

Workflows to enable content approval cycles

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Configure Default Workflows

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Creating Web Experiences

using Themes, and Portlets

Once the overall structure is set, Use populate pages with portlets

and dynamic applications to create your web experience.

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Build Web Experiences

Review Key Portlets that you wish to reuse

Develop CSS and Look and feel for Portlets

Define your own UI views and develop New

Portlets

Integrate other applications into Liferay using

Liferay Services API

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