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Liferay Portal by default is configured to sit at the root (i.e., /) of your application server. Dedicating your application server to running only Liferay Portal is a good practice, allowing for separation between your portal environment and your web ap- plication environment. This is generally a best practice for portals, which by defini- tion are application development platforms in and of themselves. For that reason, your instance of Liferay is likely to be hosting many applications, and even integrat- ing several of them together on a single page. For this reason, you are going to want to make sure your portal environment has all the resources it needs to do this, and configuring it so that it is the sole consumer of any other .war files that get deployed to the application server helps to make sure that your system performs optimally.

If, however, you want Liferay to share space on an application server with other applications, there is no reason why you cannot do that. In this instance, you may not want to make Liferay the default application in the root context of the server.

There are two steps to modifying this behavior:

1. Deploy Liferay in a context other than root (for example /portal).

2. Modify the portal-ext.properties file to tell Liferay the context to which it has been deployed.

To change the file, open it in a text editor. Place the portal.ctx property at the top of the file:

portal.ctx=/

This default setting defines Liferay Portal as the application that sits at the root context. If you change it to something else, say /portal, for example, you can then de- ploy Liferay in that context and it will live there instead of at the root context.

A full discussion of the portal-ext.properties file appears in Chapter 4.

Note for WebLogic Users: WebLogic also requires that you modify the weblo-

gic.xml file which is included with Liferay. In this file are tags for the context root:

<context-root>/</context-root>

Change this so that it matches the path you set in your portal-ext.properties file. You will have to modify the weblogic.xml file inside the Liferay .war itself. Extract the file from the .war file, modify it, and then put it back in the .war file. Then deploy the modified Liferay .war file to the server in the proper context.

Summary

This chapter is a guide to everything about installing Liferay. Whether you choose a Liferay bundle or an existing application server, Liferay Portal integrates seamlessly with your enterprise Java environment. It is supported on more applica- tion servers than any other portal platform, allowing you to preserve your invest- ment in your application server of choice, or giving you the freedom to move to a dif- ferent application server platform. The choice is yours: Liferay Portal won't get in your way, and you can feel safe knowing that you have the freedom to use the soft- ware that is best for your organization.

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ONFIGURATIONONFIGURATION

Once Liferay is successfully installed, you can begin configuring it to fit it to your environment and your particular portal project. You can perform many of these con- figuration tasks through Liferay's portlet-driven user interface.

You will want to customize your portal by configuring various settings for it, such as email notifications, integration with services such as LDAP, creating users, user groups, organizations, and roles, and readying your portal to have its content and applications loaded by your developers. This chapter covers these activities:

● Liferay's User Interface: How to navigate around Liferay and make use of the

Control Panel.

● Liferay Administration: How to administer a Liferay portal.

● Global Portal Settings: Password policies, Settings, Monitoring, and more.

Liferay's User Interface

Liferay is a portal server. This means that it is designed to be a single environment where all of the applications a user needs can run, and these are integrated together in a consistent and systematic way. If an application lives outside of the portal, the portal should be able to consume some resource of the application (such as an RSS feed or a subset of functionality in a “dashboard” application) so that the end user can see everything he or she interacts with at a glance.

To achieve this, all of the application functionality within Liferay Portal is in fragments of the page called portlets. Portlets are web applications that run in a por- tion of a web page. The heart of any portal-based web site is its portlets, because port- lets are where all of the functionality is implemented. Liferay's core is a portlet con- tainer, and the container's job is to aggregate the set of portlets that are to appear on

arrange them in the way that works best for the user.

Portlet applications, like servlet applications, have become a Java standard which various portal server vendors have implemented. The Java standard defines the port- let specification. A JSR-168 or JSR-286 standard portlet should be deployable on any portlet container which supports those standards. Portlets are placed on the page in a certain order by the end user and are served up dynamically by the portal server.

Portal applications come generally in two flavors: 1) multiple portlets can be written to provide small amounts of functionality and then are aggregated by the portal server into a larger application, or 2) whole applications can be written to reside in only one or a few portlet windows. The choice is up to those designing the application. Developers only have to worry about what happens inside of the portlet itself; the portal server handles building out the page as it is presented to the user.

Portlets are not difficult to build, and Java standard portlets can be written by any Java developer with experience in writing web applications. Liferay provides a Plugins Software Development Kit that makes creating portlet projects easy. For fur- ther information about the Plugins SDK, please see the Liferay Developer's Guide.

Additionally, Liferay supports portlets written in other programming languages, such as PHP, Ruby, Groovy, or Python. Sample portlets written in these languages are available to download from our Sourceforge site (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ l portal) or can be checked out from our Subversion repository (https://l portal .svn. - sourceforge.net/svnroot/l portal).