Touring Liferay Portal's User Interface

Liferay Portal’s user interface is designed to be simple and intuitive. Across the top is what’s known as the Dockbar, a series of links that appear based on the permissions of the logged-in user. There are four sections in the Dockbar: Admin, My Sites, Notifications, and the User section.

The Admin section gives you access to Liferay Portal’s Site Administration interface, as well as to the Control Panel. Both of these are explained in more detail later in this book. Site administration in particular can be done directly on the page as well, as will be described.

Figure 2.1: The Dockbar provides convenient access to Liferay Portals functions.

Figure 2.1: The Dockbar provides convenient access to Liferay Portal's functions.

The My Sites section provides a list of the sites which the logged-in user can access. These appear as a drop down list. Next are Notifications. The Notifications icon shows the unread notifications and requests you have. You are notified upon receiving a private message, an invitation to join a site, a social connection request, or an event reminder. Alerts and announcements created via the Alerts or Announcements applications are accessible via the Notifications icon. Clicking Mark as Read clears notifications from the list, but leaves each request for you to respond to individually. Clicking Notifications or Requests lets you view further details about each item you’ve received and lets you configure your preferences for receiving notifications and requests.

Finally, the user section shows the users name and provides links to the user’s profile (his or her publicly-accessible pages), dashboard (his or her private pages), account settings, and a sign out link.

On the left side of the page are three icons: one for add, one for previews, and one to show or hide the edit controls if you have administrative access to the page. All of these are explained later in this chapter.

Anything else you see on the page is provided by the theme that is installed. This includes site navigation and application windows, called portlets. Let’s jump in and start creating the site we’ll use for this book.

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