Setting up a new website with Liferay Portal - basic steps?

Question

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

How do I create a website with Liferay portal - the docs are pretty light on this fundamental issue and are all for version 4.4. I am using version 5.2 and the docs don't seem to be relevant.

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

Further I notice that the docs talk about doing work in Eclipse. If our website is all static HTML, (the reason we want liferay is mainly so that we can edit content items using its content management tools), then will there be any need for Java dev, or will it all be drag n drop and clicking to get setup. Any guidance will be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Liferay can be used as a simple CMS, without much Java knowledge : creating, editing and positioning of web content fragments are drag'n'drop and use of the included rich text editor. But to start using Liferay for your company, there are two main steps : a technical configuration (database, etc.), and a look'n'feel customization.

The technical part

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

• the name of your company
• if you want to display a terms of use page on first login
• if you want anybody to be able to create an account on your portal
• the database where the data will be stored

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

A sample 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

Once done, you can startup your application server. As the default admin (named test, something you can change in the portal-ext.properties file), you can access to the centralized web "control center", located in the "dock" (the strange menu labelled "welcome Test" in the upper right part of any page once logged in). I would advise you to read the administration guide, useful for most administrative tasks.

The "branding" part

Liferay uses "Themes" to automatically decorate the portal pages (logo, navigation, portlet borders...) using images, CSS, Javascript (JQuery) and the templating language Velocity. The themes are bundled in a .war file, like a standard web application, and deployed on the fly either via the control center or by dropping the file in the deploy directory of the server. Liferay can use several themes at the same time, one for each community (a group of pages, users and content) for example. Creating your own theme can be done afterwards, using the "Plugins SDK".

The Wiki, forums and blogs can be very useful.