Liferay new portlet vs plugin project difference

Question

I'm using Eclipse and have the Liferay plugin installed and trying to create a new portlet. I want the Liferay IDE to pre-generate as much code as possible

Does anyone know what the main differences are between creating a new Liferay Portlet and a Liferay Plugin Project?

Answer 1

Liferay Plugin Project allows you to create a project (of type portlet, theme, hook etc..), with all dependencies and settings that you need to start coding (or almost).

Liferay portlet adds to one of your plugin projects of type portlet a class (the portlet class) and optionally a JSP. But you have to tell the portlet how use this class and jsp, and probably many other missing settings.

I suggest you always use the Liferay Plugin Project, its simpler and fast.

Answer 2

I'd rather use a different explanation than Marco:

A plugin project is what you add to the IDE - This is where your actual plugins live. Eclipse organizes around projects, and the projects are what makes up a plugin for Liferay. As the IDE interprets different kinds of projects in a different way (e.g. standalone Java Applications vs. "Dynamic Web projects" etc), a "Portlet Project" or "Theme Project" just adds to this list.

Once you have a plugin project (of type "Portlet") you can add as many portlets to it as you like. Thus, if you're developing portlets, you'll always have a minimum of one portlet plugin. This portlet plugin can hold any number of portlets.

You'll always deploy the whole plugin to Liferay - this fact might influence which portlets you want to group into a single plugin.