Relación costo-beneficio del proyecto

The Admin portlet lets you perform various administrative tasks relating to serv- er administration, as opposed to administering resources in the portal. Clicking the first tab (the Server tab) of the Admin portlet makes this abundantly clear: you're im- mediately presented with a graph showing the resources available in the JVM.

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The first tab under the Server tab is called Resources. This tab contains the afore- mentioned graph plus several server wide actions that an administrator can execute. These are:

● Garbage collection: You can send in a request to the JVM to begin the garbage collection task.

● Clearing caches: You can send in a request to the JVM to clear a single VM cache, the cluster cache, or the database cache.

● Reindex: You can send in a request to regenerate all search indexes. This will impact portal performance, so try not to do this except at non-peak times.

● Generate Thread Dump: If you are performance testing, you can generate a thread dump which can be examined later to determine if there are any deadlocks and where they might be.

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Here you can dynamically modify the log levels for any class hierarchy in the portal. If you have custom code that you have deployed which isn't in the list, you can

log levels changed. If you are testing something specific, it is much better to be as spe- cific as you can when you change log levels, as by modifying them too high in the hi- erarchy you can generate a lot more log messages than you probably need.

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This tab shows an exhaustive list of system properties for the JVM, as well as many Liferay system properties. This information can be used for debugging purposes or to check the configuration of the currently running portal.

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This tab shows an exhaustive list of the portal properties. These properties can be customized as will be seen in the next chapter. If you need to check the current value of a particular property, it can be viewed from this screen without having to shut down the portal or open any properties files.

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If you ever need to shut down your Liferay Portal server while users are logged in, you can use the Shutdown tab to inform your logged-in users of the impending shutdown. You can define the number of minutes until the shutdown and a custom message that will be displayed.

Users will see your message at the top of their portal pages for the duration of time you specified. When the time expires, all portal pages will display a message say- ing the portal has been shut down. At this point, the server will need to be restarted to restore access.

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Liferay Portal contains a JSR-170 compliant document repository. This repository allows users to upload documents in many formats into a folder structure that they define.

OpenOffice.org is an open source office suite which is normally run in graphical mode to create documents, but it can be run in “server” mode. When run in server mode, OpenOffice.org can be used to convert documents to and from all of the file types it supports. Liferay's Document Library portlet can make use of this feature to automatically convert documents on the fly.

You would use this tab to tell Liferay how to connect to your running instance of OpenOffice.org. You can install OpenOffice.org on the same server upon which Liferay is running. Once you have it installed, you can start OpenOffice.org in server mode with the following command:

soffice -headless -accept="socket,host=127.0.0.1,port=8100;urp;" -nofirst- startwizard

As you can see, the command above specifies that OpenOffice.org will run on port 8100, which is the default port in the Admin portlet. If you can use this port, all you need to do is check the Enabled box, and Liferay will be integrated with OpenOf-

fice.org.

If you have something else running on this port, find a port that is open and specify it both in the command above and on the Admin portlet's OpenOffice.org con- figuration page. When you are finished, click Save.

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Liferay Portal allows you to run more than one portal instance on a single server. Data for each portal instance are kept separate from every other portal instance. All portal data, however, is kept in the same database.

Each portal instance requires its own domain name. Liferay will direct users to the proper portal instance based on this domain name. So before you configure an in- stance, configure its domain name in your network first. When you're ready to add an instance, click the Add button on the Instances tab.

You'll be prompted for three fields:

Web ID: A general convention is to use the domain name for this. It's a user-gen- erated ID for the instance.

Virtual Host: Put the domain name you configured in your network here. When users are directed to your Liferay server via this domain name, Liferay will then be able to send them to the proper portal instance.

Mail Domain: Enter the domain name for the mail host for this instance. Liferay will use this to send email notifications from the portal.

When you are finished filling out the form, click Save. Now navigate to the portal using your new domain name. You will see that you are brought to what looks like a clean install of Liferay. This is your new portal instance which can now be configured any way you like.

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The Plugins tab shows all of the plugins that are currently installed. These are di- vided into tabs for portlets, themes, layout templates, and web applications. If you want to install a new plugin, click the Install More Portlets button. You will then be brought to the Plugin Installer, where you can browse Liferay's repository of portlets or install your own plugins. The Plugin Installer will be covered in the next chapter.

Summary

This chapter has described the resources in Liferay Portal that can be configured to build the site you need to build. We have seen how to navigate Liferay's user inter- face so that you can get anywhere you need to in the portal. We have also looked at overall portal architecture and how you might go about designing your site using Lif- eray.

organizations, user groups, and roles. We also learned how to configure various serv- er settings, such as authentication, LDAP integration, and single sign-on. We also learned how to associate users by default with different user groups, communities, and roles, and we saw how to reserve screen names and email addresses so that users cannot register in the portal with them.

Next, we saw how to view and configure overall server settings. We saw how to view the memory currently being used by the server, as well as how to initiate garbage collection, a thread dump, search engine re-indexing, and the clearing of var- ious caches. We learned how to debug parts of the portal by changing log levels, and by viewing the various properties that are defined in the portal.

Finally, we learned how to properly notify users that the portal is about to shut down and how to enable the OpenOffice.org integration. The ability to run multiple portal instances on one installation of Liferay was covered, and we saw how to view the plugins that are currently installed.

All of this information should help to bring you well on your way to becoming a seasoned Liferay Portal Administrator.

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