Developing Themes For Liferay

Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim

1. Developing Themes For Liferay

2. Download liferay-plugins-sdk-5.2.3 or latest and unzip it. http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/downloads/additional

3. Create Java Project in your eclipse
     1.New->Java Project
     2.Project Name :-any name that you want
     3.Select Create Project from existing source and select your liferay-plugins-sdk-5.2.3 folder
     4.finish.

3. Inside liferay-plugins-sdk-5.2.3 folder there is build.properties file copy that file and rename
 that copied file with build.${username}.properties

4. open  build.${username}.properties file now go to specify the paths to an unzipped tomcat 5.5.x bundle line and give path for your tomcat and comment the properties for tomcat 6.0 version(which is by default). If you are using tomcat 6.0 give path for tomcate 6.0.
  
5. Now open command prompt go to your liferay-plugins-sdk-5.2.3 folder,in that go to themes

6. Give command as follows.
 E:\liferaytraining\liferay-plugins-sdk-5.2.3\themes>create first "first"

7. Now go to your eclipse and refresh the themes folder. There you can see the folder name with
            first-theme.
    In this first-theme two more folders will be there 1._diffs and 2.WEB-INF

8.Now inside _diffs folder create 4 folders as follows.
        1.css
        2.images
        3.javascript
        4.templates

9.    You can download sample themes from Lifery web site    these themes will be available as .war file
    download few of them. And unzip them.

10. Form thad unzip theme folder copy four folders css,templates,images and javascript copy them to your
        first-theme\_diffs folder.

11. Open command prompt go to your first-theme folder and give ant deploy command as follows.
            E:\liferaytraining\liferay-plugins-sdk-5.2.3\themes\first-theme>ant deploy

12. Restart your tomcat and login.

13.Go to Manage Pages and click on look And Feel, there you can see your newly deployed theme. apply it.


Source: http://www.mpowerglobal.com/web/guest/blog/-/blogs/developing-themes


Alhamdulillah.
Hidayah

Force refresh of css files

Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim

QUESTION:
Hi!

When I make changes in the css files of my theme (e.g. in navigation.css) and then deploy the theme, the changes are not shown in my browser until I choose to refresh the browser. If I don't refresh the browser, cached copies of the old css files are used.

Is there any way to force the removal of cached css files whenever a change has been made in them?


ANSWERS:


Open portal-ext.properties
tomcat/webapps/root/web-inf/classes/


Add this in your portal-ext.properties file :

theme.css.fast.load=false
theme.images.fast.load=false

javascript.fast.load=true
javascript.log.enabled=true

layout.template.cache.enabled=false

browser.launcher.url=

combo.check.timestamp=true

freemarker.engine.cache.storage=soft:1
freemarker.engine.modification.check.interval=0

openoffice.cache.enabled=false

velocity.engine.resource.manager.cache.enabled=false

com.liferay.portal.servlet.filters.cache.CacheFilter=false

com.liferay.portal.servlet.filters.themepreview.ThemePreviewFilter=true



or simply add this line :

include-and-override=portal-developer.properties





Alhamdulillah.
Hidayah

Why Liferay portal? Part 2 of 2

High adaptability to th e demands of fast-changing market
Liferay portal provides high adaptability to the demands of a fast-changing market. In general, Liferay portal can grow according to your organizations. For instance, Liferay portal allows clustering—the addition of hardware to meet growing usage demands. Thus, the capacity for content and applications is boundless.
On the one hand, Liferay portal integrates with workflow engine such as jBPM and Intalio.

A Workflow engine is an automation of processes. It involves a combination of human- and machine-based activities, and interaction with applications and tools in particular. By this integration, Liferay portal allows organizations of all sizes to be more agile that makes business processes more dynamic, modular, and adaptable to the demands of fast-changing markets.

On the other hand, Liferay portal was benchmarked using LogicLibrary's Logiscan. No matter how your processes change, you can always be confident about the security of your data. For this reason, Liferay portal is benchmarked as one of the most secure portal platforms in the market.

Further, Liferay portal accommodates global business environment with multilingual support. For example, after adding a language portlet to any page, you can quickly select a different localization with one simple click.



Highest values
Liferay portal also provides the highest value at every level. Liferay portal is based on 100% standards and a set of key technologies. The standards include AJAX and JSON, hCalendar Micro-format and iCalendar, JSR-127 and JSR-314 (compliant JSF), JSR-168 and JSR-286 (compliant portlet), JSR-170 (Content Repository API for CMS), JSR-220 (Hibernate), OpenSearch, WebDAV, WSRP, and so on.

The technologies involve ICEFaces, jQuery JavaScript Framework, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Spring and AOP, Struts and Tiles, Velocity, FreeMarker, and so on. More importantly, you have the freedom to integrate with your favorite content repository such as Liferay CMS, Alfresco, FatWire, Magnolia, Vignette, and so on. In short, Liferay portal strengthens the compliance to the standards and reduces the risk of investment.


More interestingly, Liferay portal leverages the existing IT environment and works with any application server, database server, or operating system with over 700 deployment configurations. Surely, your existing technology investments are not discarded. Further, the future changes will not require an overhaul of an existing Liferay portal installation.

Why Liferay portal? Part 1 of 2

Generally speaking, portals offer basic benefits that involve personalization, customization, and workflow. Personalization means that different people with the same role work differently. Different roles require different information via customization. People also have direct access to information and applications they need through workflow. Further, customization ensures that people do not miss anything. Liferay portal is one of the most mature portal frameworks in the market. It offers these basic benefits and much more.

Besides the basic benefits mentioned above, Liferay portal provides a number of the key business benefits, some of which are have been discussed in the following sections:

A rich, friendly, intu itive, and collabor ative end user experience
A good user experience is regarded as a key to capture the highest return on an enterprise portal investment. Liferay portal maximizes the productivity gains of portal users and provides a rich, friendly, intuitive, and collaborative end-user experience.

• Intuitive—users can drag-and-drop portlets to customize the experience to the unique preferences of a user or community.
• Rich—users can use one of the theme plugins from both the out of the box and the community to change the look and feel of the portal without dealing with complex code. There are more than 60 theme plugins available in the community.
• Friendly—community members can have their pages with a user-defined friendly URL. This gives the users a better sense of ownership over the technology. Thus, it enhances the user experience, and moreover, generates users' loyalty.
• Collaborative—users can create true communities of users via collaborative tools such as instant messaging, message boards, blogs, Wikis, and so on.

A single point of access to all infor mation
As we know, it will become very annoying to collaborate across business units or among distinct business entities if the end users have to stop and log into the applications every single time. Fortunately, Liferay portal provides users a single point of access to all organization's data, content, web content, and other information from existing in-house applications (that is, HR, CRM) as well as external sources (for example Alfresco, FatWire, Magnolia, and Vignette). That is, in a web site, users can access all organization's data, content, web content, and other information via a single point of access.

By integration with LDAP, information about users and groups are managed in a centralized server. Liferay portal, portlets, and others applications can share the same users' and groups' information directly.
By integration with SSO, users need to log in once to access all their information needs. For example, after the users have logged in once in the Liferay portal, they can automatically log in the portlets such as Alfresco client, Alfresco content, and other systems.

Moreover, the fine-grained permissioning allows the users to customize and control the user access to sensitive information and functionality. Users get an intuitive frontend, whereas behind the scenes, Liferay portal supports Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) such as Service-Mix and Mule technologies. Thus, it simplifies the integration, upgrade, and substitution of disparate applications for the developers.

In addition, Control Panel provides centralized administration for all content, users, organizations, communities, roles, server resources, and more. It has full customizability with the ability to hide different parts of the form as desired, or add custom ones with portlets.

Especially, as a social collaboration solution for the enterprise, My Social Office provides full virtual workspace, streamlines communication, saves time, builds group cohesion, and raises productivity. With My Social Office, all you have to do is log in and work the way you want at your own convenience.

Liferay collabor ation and social networ king software

Liferay collaboration and social networking software take advantage of the benefits of today's virtualized work environment. The portal ties all of the collaboration functions together with the latest social networking features for a truly dynamic work experience. By using this, you share what you know. It has the following features:

• Blogs, Wikis, mail, calendar, enterprise Instant Message (IM), RSS, and more.
• Micro-format support—calendar and user information can be transferred via Web 2.0 standards. Data in micro formats (hCard, hCalendar, and so on) can be easily used by and integrated with third-party applications.
• Dynamic tagging—tagging web content, documents, message board threads, and more, to dynamically share important or interesting content with other portal users.
• Activity tracking—keeping tabs on the most recent activity on blogs,
  message boards, Wiki, and other tools.
• Announcements and alerts—broadcasting messages to different groups
  of users.
• Social networking services.
• Capability to build My Social Office.
• Polls—creating multiple choice polls and keeping track of votes.
  WSRP 2.0 consumer/producer and full 1.0/2.0 specification support.
  Integration with Terracotta DSO: setting up large and clustering environments.
  

Liferay CMS and WCM

Liferay's built-in CMS and WCM supports portal-based web content publishing
and document/content management. Liferay CMS and WCM haves at least the following features:

• Document Library and Image Gallery—one central place to aggregate and manage all content.
• Dynamic virtual hosting—allows using the same installation of Liferay portal to spin off an infinite number of other portals.
• Publishing workflow, versioning, structured content, XSL content, breadcrumb, navigation and Velocity templates, and WYSIWYG editing for end users.
• The Asset Publisher portlet—publishes any piece of content in your portal as though it were a Web Content portal, either through a set of publishing rules or by manual selection.
• The Web Content portlet (also called Journal, accessible through the Control Panel)—helps create, edit, and publish articles, as well as article templates for one-click changes in layout. It has built-in workflow, article versioning, search, and metadata.
• The Web Content List (called Journal Articles)—displaying a dynamic list of all journal articles for a given community.
• The Web Content Display (called Journal Content)—publishes any article from the Journal CMS on a portal page.
• The Web Content Search portlet—it's powered by the Apache Lucene search engine; search can be restricted to Journal CMS articles.
• The Nested Portlets portlet—allows the users to drag-and-drop portlets into other portlets, making complex page layouts possible.
• Custom attributes—adds custom attributes to users and organization forms. It provides a framework to add custom attributes to any ServiceBuilder entity at runtime.
  Page staging, scheduling, and publishing, either locally or remotely.
  Integration with SharePoint—implementation of the SharePoint protocol allows to save documents to Liferay as if it were a SharePoint server.
  

Liferay portal

As the world's leading open source enterprise portal, Liferay portal provides portal solution for both the public and private sectors.

The Liferay portal has at least the following features:

• Runs on all major application servers and Servlet containers, databases, and operating systems, and over 700 deployment combinations.
• Uses the latest in Java, J2EE, and Web 2.0 technologies.
• Uses an open SOA framework.
• JSR-168/JSR-286 compliant.
• Out of the box usability over 60 portlets.
• Personalized pages for all users.
• AJAX-enabled user interface.
• Multilanguage support—localizing up to 22 languages.
• Full LDAP synchronization and secure Single Sign On (SSO) support.
• Granular role-based authorizations.
• Control Panel—centralized administration for all content, users, organizations, communities, roles, server resources; full customizability with the ability to hide different parts of the form as desired or add custom ones with portlets.
• Single-click configuration, dynamic drag-and-drop, search and tagging capability, and work from desktop, for example WebDAV.
• Built-in CMS, WCM, Collaboration, and Social Networking.

What's Liferay portal?

What's Liferay portal?

As the world's leading open source portal platform, Liferay portal provides a unified web interface to the data and tools scattered across many sources. Within Liferay portal, a portal interface is composed of a number of portlets—self-contained interactive elements that are written to a particular standard. As portlets are developed independent from the portal itself and are loosely coupled with the portal, they are, apparently, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Liferay portal has a wide range of portlets freely available for things such as blogs, calendar, Document Library, Image Gallery, mail, message boards, polls, RSS feeds, Wiki, web content, and so on. Liferay portal also ships with the Content Management System (CMS) and Web Content Management (WCM) solutions. Liferay CMS provides basic Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMS) features. Liferay portal is the best ECMS for small team collaborations. Event data can be specific to a small group within a company. In any organization, some data will be relevant at a team level and other data that will be relevant across the whole business. Liferay portal supports such things very well.

As the world's leading open source enterprise portal solution, Liferay portal uses the latest Java, J2EE, and Web 2.0 technologies in order to deliver solutions for enterprises across both public and private sectors. Meanwhile, the built-in web content management and a content integration framework allow us to aggregate and publish existing repository content with new content. This helps create web sites and collaborative workspaces, for example, intranets, extranets, team sites, and so on. In addition, the built-in suite of social computing tools allows multiple forums, Wikis, blogs, and Document Libraries to be created and matched to specific user groups or knowledge areas within the same site.

Liferay currently has the following three main functionalities:
1. Liferay portal—JSR-168/JSR 286 enterprise portal platform.
2. Liferay CMS and WCM—JSR-170 content management system and web content management.
3. Liferay collaboration and social software—collaboration software such as blogs, calendar, web mail, message boards, polls, RSS feeds, Wiki, presence (AJAX chat client, dynamic friend list, activity wall, activity tracker), alert and announcement, and so on.

Generally speaking, a web site built by Liferay might consist of CMS and WCM,
a portal, and collaboration and social software.