Chapter 5. Building your own portal
This chapter covers
- Creating organization, roles, and users in Liferay Portal
- Creating portal pages and adding portlets
- Setting permissions for portal pages and portlets
- Configuring Liferay Portal
- Developing portal themes and layouts with the Liferay Plugins SDK
Chapters 3 and 4 introduced the Portlet 2.0 API with an example Book Catalog portlet. Now that you know the nuts and bolts of portal development, it’s time to build your own web portal. In this chapter, you’ll develop a web portal, named Book Portal, with Liferay Portal.
You’ll see firsthand the importance of knowing your portal server and how built-in features of the portal server can reduce your development effort for custom portlets. How quickly you can develop and deploy a functional web portal should be one of the criteria you use in selecting a portal server. In some cases, depending on your portal server’s features, you may consider adjusting the design of your custom portlets so they’re easier to develop quickly (you’ll see this in the context of the Book Catalog portlet, later in this chapter).
Note
This chapter is specific to Liferay Portal. If you’re not using Liferay Portal, you might want to skip or skim through this chapter. If you’re new to portlet development, you should read this chapter to get a feel for web portal development. If you’re using GateIn Portal, refer to appendix A for details on how to create a web portal with GateIn.