As we learned earlier, roles can be scoped by the portal, by a site, or by an organization. A role only takes effect within its scope. For example, a Message Boards Administrator role with complete access to the Message Boards portlet has different permissions based on the role’s scope. If it’s a portal role, members have permission to administer message boards across the entire portal. If it’s a site role, members only have permission to administer message boards within the site where they’ve been assigned the role. For organizations with sites, site roles are automatically assigned to organization members based on the organization roles they have. So for an organization-scoped Message Boards administrator role, members only have permission to administer message boards within the site of the organization that assigned the role to them.
We also use the word scope to refer to the data set of a portlet. By default, when a portlet is added to a page in a site, it is scoped for that site. This means that its data belongs to that site. If the portlet is added to a page in a different site, it employs a completely different data set. This enables you to place a Message Boards portlet in one site with one set of categories and threads, and place another Message Boards portlet in different site with a different set of categories and threads.
Scoping by site means that you can only have one Message Boards portlet per site. If you add one Message Boards portlet to a page in a site and add another Message Boards portlet to a different page in the same site, the second Message Boards portlet contains exactly the same data as the first. This is because, by default, the Message Boards portlet is scoped by site. Most of Liferay’s other portlets also default to being scoped by site.
To avoid this limitation, many Liferay portlets can be scoped by page. In this case, the data sets of page-scoped portlets serve a single page, not an entire site. If you set the scope of a portlet to page instead of site, you can add any number of these portlets to different pages, and then they have different sets of data. This allows you to have more than one message board per site if you wish. Most portlets, however, default to the “native” configuration, and have their scopes set to the site where they are placed.
Unless otherwise noted, all the portlets in this chapter support scoping by portal (global), site (default), or page . This grants you some flexibility in how you want to set up your portal. You can configure the scope of a portlet with just a few simple steps.
-
Click the Options icon in the portlet window (the gear icon).
-
Select Configuration.
-
Select the Scope tab.
-
Use the drop-down menu to set the scope.
Figure 4.9: You can change the scope of your portlet by navigating to its Configuration menu.
That’s all it takes to change the scope for a particular portlet instance. By setting the scope to the current page, you can add as many of these portlets to a site as you want, provided they are all added to separate pages.
Another useful feature of Liferay’s portlets is Archived Setups.