Installing the social portlets

The social portlets are all included with the Liferay Community Edition distribution, but need to be installed separately for Enterprise Edition. If you're using Liferay Enterprise Edition, or had previously removed the social portlets from Community Edition, you can use Liferay's plugin installer to easily add social features to your portal.


If you're logged in as an adminstrator, go to the control panel, and in the Server section, click on Plugins Installation. From here, click on Install More Portlets and search for Social Networking. Once the results come up, select the latest version of the Social Networking Portlet, and then click Install. Once the install process finishes, you can start using the social networking portlets.

Read More

Liferay's social portlets

Liferay has many portlets available for social interaction and collaboration. Some of these portlets are designed to help you work together as a team, while others are designed to foster social interactions between team members at your organization.
Some of the social portlets should be used on the public pages of your portal, while others should be used as part of a user's personal site. As you might guess, the portlets for personal page use are more focused on simple social interactions, while the ones which can be placed on any site help improve productivity.


Unless otherwise noted, these portlets are all provided with minimal configuration options. Most of them have two configuration options--the option to change permissions for the portlet view and sharing options for connecting the portlet to other web sites. They do not have any way to change options like feed length or display styles. Some styling changes, however, can be done through custom CSS.

Read More

Social Networking with Liferay

Since the first social networks rose to popularity, concepts such as Friend and later Like--previously reserved for direct human interaction--have taken on new meaning in an always-online, information driven culture. It could be argued that social networks have transformed the way people interact with their friends, relatives, and colleagues. Friends, connections, followers, circles, and lists have enabled people to connect and stay connected in ways they'd never been able to before. Initially, these concepts proved to be highly successful for casual web sites but they didn't take to the business world as quickly. But now, more and more organizations are realizing the importance of leveraging social interactions for more than just recreation. Liferay's robust social features make it a great platform for business web sites, casual web sites, and everything in between.

Liferay has a constantly improving set of social features which enable you to encourage social interactions on your own portal, and to leverage the power and popularity of other social networks. In this chapter, we'll discuss:

• General use social portlets
• Social portlets for personal pages
• Configuring personal pages for social networking
• How to connect users using Liferay social relations
• Social equity
• Integrating Liferay with other social sites

When we're finished, you'll have a good idea how you can use Liferay to power your social network.

Read More

Purpose of portal-ext.properties

portal-ext.properties contains various configuration parameters. These settings

 can be modified or further settings can be added. For example, there is no existing section for database pool in portal-ext.properties but one can add the same as described in question 25.

Read More

What is inter portlet communication

Inter portlet communication (IPC) was introduced in JSR 286
More reading:

http://www.liferay.com/web/james.min/blog/-/blogs/241107

http://www.liferay.com/community/wiki/-/wiki/Main/Inter-portlet+communication

Read More

Difference between a Liferay Hook and Liferay EXT

Hooks is a feature to catch hold of the properties and JSP files into an instance of the portal as if catching them with a hook. Hookplugins are more powerful plugins that come to complement portlets, themes, layout templates, and web modules. A hook plugin is always combined with a portlet plugin. For instance, the portlet social-portlet is a portlet plugin for Social Office with hooks. In general, hooks would be very helpful tools to customize the portal without touching the code part of the portal. In addition, you would use hooks to provide patches for the portal systems or social office products.

EXT is used to customize and extend the Liferay portal. EXT builds a new ROOT webapp and replaces by a huge build mechanism your existing Liferay portal.
The Liferay EXT Environment is where you would ideally make changes to the portal itself. In other words, this is where you customize or “extend” the portal. You may ask, “Why can’t we just make the changes to the portal source directly?” The answer is that you technically CAN, but if and when you have to upgrade, you will have a tough time sorting out what is out-of-the-box and what is customized. EXT Environment keeps things separate.

Read More

Vm files in Liferay theme

Default theme velocity files and their purposes.

File	Purpose
init_custom.vm	Allows you to add custom Velocity variables.
init.vm	In conjunction with VelocityVariables.java in Liferay, sets many Velocity variables that correspond to Liferay Java objects.
navigation.vm	Implements the page navigation within the theme.
portal_normal.vm	The overall template for all pages the theme implements. This file includes the other files.
portal_pop_up.vm	The overall template for any portlets that use the Liferay pop-up custom window state.
portlet.vm	The template for portlet windows within the theme.

Read More

CSS files in Liferay theme

 Purposes CSS files in Liferay theme
Default theme CSS files and their purposes.

File	Purpose
application.css	Contains default styling having to do with components of applications. This includes the tabs, expandable trees, dialog overlays, and the results grid (that is, search container). Much of the markup for these styles is created by Liferay’s tag libraries.
base.css	Contains default styling for standard HTML tags, such as paragraphs, headings,tables, and more. This file also contains styling for some Liferay-specific page elements, such as errors, warnings, tooltips, the loading animation, and more.
dockbar.css	Contains default styling for the Dockbar, which floats at the top of the page when a user is logged in
custom.css	A blank file that is loaded last. As a best practice, theme developers should put their custom styles here to override default styles provided by Liferay in the other theme CSS files.
forms.css	Contains default styling for all form elements.
layout.css	Contains default styling used by layout templates.
main.css	Contains no styling, but imports the rest of the files.
navigation.css	Contains default styling for the main navigation elements.
portlet.css	Contains default styling for the portlet windows.

Read More

Different languages in Liferay Themes.

 Different themes for Different languages in Liferay Themes

If you need different languages in your portal and also different theme based your language

Step 1 : Add languages portlet in banner. Using runtime in portal-normal.vm

Step 2: Write the css for align the languages portlet

Step 3:  Add these lines in portal_normal.vm

#if($locale == "RTL")
<link rel="stylesheet" href="$css_folder/rtl-custom.css" type="text/css"></link>
#else if($locale == "LTR")
<link rel="stylesheet" href="$css_folder/ltr-custom.css" type="text/css"></link>
#end


Step 4
rtl-custom.css,lrt-custom.css these both files having css related to body of theme. these files would place on css folder of your theme.

You need to apply css on body something as below 


body {
    background:url("../images/bg/body.jpg") repeat-x scroll left 90px #EEEEEE;
    font-size:10px;
    font-family:verdana,sans-serif;
    margin:0;
    padding:0;
}

 

Read More

Different languages in Liferay Themes.

 Different themes for Different languages in Liferay Themes

If you need different languages in your portal and also different theme based your language

Step 1 : Add languages portlet in banner. Using runtime in portal-normal.vm

Step 2: Write the css for align the languages portlet

Step 3:  Add these lines in portal_normal.vm

#if($locale == "RTL")
<link rel="stylesheet" href="$css_folder/rtl-custom.css" type="text/css"></link>
#else if($locale == "LTR")
<link rel="stylesheet" href="$css_folder/ltr-custom.css" type="text/css"></link>
#end


Step 4
rtl-custom.css,lrt-custom.css these both files having css related to body of theme. these files would place on css folder of your theme.

You need to apply css on body something as below 


body {
    background:url("../images/bg/body.jpg") repeat-x scroll left 90px #EEEEEE;
    font-size:10px;
    font-family:verdana,sans-serif;
    margin:0;
    padding:0;
}

 

Read More