New to Liferay 6.0

Question

I have only recently started using Liferay 6.0. I have downloaded liferay-portal-tomcat-6.0.4_1 community edition.

First of all can you please recommend me some website and books or articles for Liferay 6.0? (The ones available on the Internet are for earlier versions...)

Secondly. I don' t seem to get the structure of Liferay. For example, how do organisation, communities, users, pages all fit in together?

Lastly, could you tell me how I could make a link on a page to point to a directory on the file system at the local machine of the user?

Thanks.

Answer 1

To work through Liferay internals is really tough but it's not impossible. There's no main source of documentation and people has to google around and forget things very easily without possibility to get back to the original source...

Organizations can form hierarchies as real organizations would. Communities has similar role as organizations but from a different point of view.
The main difference consists in :

persistence - persists in time in contrast to communities which appears and disappears

administration - users “belong” to an organization which means that the the admin of an organization is able to edit his profile. On the other hand users “join” a community which means that the community admin can only manage the membership.

Relationship - organizations can form a hierarchy while communities are independent of each other

membership - users “must” belong to an organization while joining a community is optional

User groups - Unlike organizations and locations, user groups have no context associated with them. They are purely a convenience grouping that aids administrators in assigning permissions and roles to a group of users instead of individual users or assigning a group of users to a community.

Roles define permissions across the portal, an organization or across a community. There are functions like creation of a thread in a discussion forum. Problem is that there are forums across scopes like community, organization or the entire portal. So that portal role grants access to creation of a new thread in each and every discussion forum and community role just within a particular community.