Creating Sites and Managing Pages

With most products, you would learn what the software can do in terms of setting up your users and security model and then start building your system. You’d design your infrastructure and get your server environment up and running while your developers write the applications that live on your web site. With Liferay Portal, however, you start farther ahead. Liferay Portal is more than just a container for applications with a robust security model. It already includes many of the applications you’ll need, out of the box, ready to go and integrated with all the user management and security features you’ve already learned about.

Nearly all Liferay users use Liferay’s Web Content Management system (WCM). After all, all every web site has content that needs to be managed. Liferay’s WCM empowers you to manage all the content on your site quickly and easily within your browser. Beyond managing existing content, Liferay WCM lets users easily create and manage everything from a simple article containing text and images to fully functional web sites. Web publishing works alongside Liferay Portal’s larger collection of applications, which means you can add shopping cart functionality, visitor polls, web forms, site collaboration tools and more. Everything is done with our collection of easy-to-use tools with familiar rich-text editors and an intuitive interface.

In this section we’ll cover some basic aspects of Liferay WCM, including:

• Page types
• Layouts
• Page and content permissions
• Importing and exporting content
• Content creation and editing
• Content publishing
• WCM Workflow

By the time we’re done, you should be able to apply all these concepts to your own content. To demonstrate Liferay’s Content Management features, we’ll create and manage content on the portal for Nose-ster, a new social network where people are connected based on what their noses look like.

First, a little housekeeping. If we’re going to be Nose-ster, our portal should also be called Nose-ster. To set general information about your portal like the name and mail domain, go to the Control Panel and select Portal Settings under the Portal heading. You could set up the configuration for Nose-ster as follows.

Figure 2.1: Changing Portal Settings

You can also customize the logo in the top left corner of every page by selecting Display Settings under the Miscellaneous tab on the panel to the right. Once you’ve made the changes, we can begin creating pages.

Creating and Managing Pages

You have a few options for accessing the page creation interface. To simplify this, we’ll cover the Dockbar’s Manage menu slightly out of order. There are two interfaces to be aware of: Site Pages and Page. You can get to these from multiple places. Depending on what you’re editing and where you are on the portal, you’ll use either the Manage menu or the Control Panel to work with your pages. From the Control Panel, make sure you have the correct site selected in the context menu selector and click the Site Pages link in the content section. If you’ve already navigated to the site you wish to manage, click Manage from the Dockbar and select Site Pages. This is the exact same interface you see in the Control Panel. To manage the specific page of the site you’ve navigated to, click Manage and select Page.

Figure 2.2: Managing Individual Pages

For convenience, you can also navigate to the Sites page under the Portal section of the Control Panel and click Actions → Manage Pages. To quickly add a single page while to the site you’re browsing, click Add from the Dockbar and select Page. Just enter a name for the page and it’s added immediately. Click the name of the page in the navigation menu to visit it and start working on it.

Figure 2.3: Managing Site Pages

Site Pages is an interface to view existing pages, create new pages, view pages and export or import pages using Liferay Archive (LAR) files. Note that you can switch between managing a set of pages and managing a single page using the left-hand side navigation menu. Click on Public Pages or Private Pages to manage the group or click on an individual page to manage just that one. Switching views like this changes the list of available tabs to the right. By default, liferay.com, which we renamed to nosester.com, contains a single public page called Welcome.

Liferay’s page groups are always associated with sites. Even users’ personal pages are part of their personal sites. All pages belong to one of two types of page sets: public pages and private pages. By default, public pages are accessible to anyone, even non-logged in users (guests). Private pages are accessible only to users who are members of the site which owns the pages. This means the private pages of an organization’s site would only be viewable by site members and members of the organization.

Regardless of whether the pages are public or private, Liferay uses the same interface to manage them. Let’s look at this interface more closely.

More Page Management Tools

From the Manage Site Pages dialog box, you can add a page to the site by clicking the Add Page button. Because Public Pages is selected on the left, clicking Add Page here adds a top level page next to the Welcome page. You can, however, nest pages as deeply as you like. To create a sub-page under the Welcome page, select the Welcome page first and then create your page. If you later decide you don’t like the order of your pages, you can drag and drop them in the list to put them in whatever order you want. Let’s go ahead and add another top level page and name it Community. We’ll use this page for the Recent Bloggers and Wiki portlets.

Figure 2.4: Adding Pages

When you create a new page, you can create either a blank page or a page prepopulated with portlets from a page template. When you’re entering the name of the page, you can select from a list of page templates that are currently available. To view the pages once you add them, click the View Pages button. This is how you’d populate your pages with content and applications. This is covered in succeeding chapters.

If you’re using the Manage Pages interface to create a new page, you’ll have some additional options to create different types of pages. There are Portlet Pages, Panel Pages, Embedded Pages, URL Pages and Link to Page. By default, all pages are created as portlet pages but in some situations you might want to use one of the other options.

Portlet Pages are the pages we’re usually talking about. They have a layout which you can drag and drop portlets into. Most of the pages you create will be portlet pages.

Panel Pages can have any number of portlets on them, as selected by an administrator, but only one will be displayed at a time. Users select which portlet they want to use from a menu on the left side of the page and the selected portlet takes up the entire page.

Figure 2.5: A panel page

Embedded Pages display content from another website inside of your portal. An administrator can set a URL from in the page management interface and that page will appear in the context and within the navigation of your Liferay portal.

URL Pages are just redirects to any URL specified by an administrator. You can use URL pages to create links to pages belonging to other sites of your portal or to pages of an external site. Use URL pages cautiously since blind redirects create a poor user experience.

Link to Page creates a portal page which functions as an immediate redirect to another page within the same site. You can select which page to link to from a dropdown in the page management interface. You could use a Link to Page to place a deeply nested page in the primary navigation menu of your site, for example.

Once you’ve created pages and populated them with content, Liferay provides a way for you to back them up to separate files. Let’s see how that works.

Backing Up and Restoring Pages

Next to the Add Page button in the Manage Site Pages screen are two buttons labeled Export and Import. The Export button exports the pages you create into a single file, called a LAR (Liferay Archive). You can then import this file into any server running Liferay to re-create the pages. If you have a LAR you would like to import, use the Import button. Exporting and Importing LARs is a great way to take content from one environment (say, a development or QA environment) and move it all in one shot to your production server. Note that you should not make this a regular occurrence. If you want to regularly move pages from one server to another, you should use Liferay’s staging environment, which is covered in chapter 3.

LARs are also a good way to back up your site’s content. You can export them to a specific location on your server which is backed up, and if you ever have to restore your site, all you need to do is import the latest LAR file. One limitation on LAR files, however, is that they are version dependent, so you can’t use an export from an old version of Liferay and import it into a newer version.

Let’s be good administrators and export a LAR file for backup purposes. Click on the Export button and then name the file nosesterv1.lar. Use the check boxes to determine what you’d like to export. For this initial export, select everything. Note that if you select the More Options link, the list expands to include data from many of Liferay’s applications, including the Documents and Media Library, Message Boards and Web Content. You can also export the theme you’re using.

Once you click Export, your browser prompts you to save the file. Once you have the file, you can copy it to a backup location for safekeeping or import it into another installation of Liferay Portal. If you must rebuild or wish to revert back to this version of your site, you can import this file by clicking the Import button from the Manage Site Pages dialog box, browsing to it and selecting it.

Next, we’ll look at the options on the right side menu, starting with Look and Feel.

Customizing the Look and Feel

When you open the Manage Site Pages dialog box it defaults to the Look and Feel tab. On this tab, you’re presented with an interface that allows you to choose a theme for the current site. Themes can transform the entire look of the portal. They are created by developers and are easily installed using the Liferay Marketplace. Since we don’t have any themes beyond the default one installed yet, we’ll use the default theme for our pages.

Figure 2.6: Look and Feel Interface

Many themes include more than one color scheme. This allows you to keep the existing look and feel while giving your site a different flavor. Change the color scheme from blue to green by selecting Green under Color Schemes. If you now go back to the site (by clicking Back to nosester.com in the top left corner of the Control Panel), you’ll see some parts of the page are now tinged in a greenish hue.

If you apply a color scheme to a set of public or private pages it is, by default, applied to each page in the set. If, however, you open the Manage Pages dialog box for a particular page, you can select Define a specific look and feel for this page to make the color scheme apply to this page only. You can use this feature to choose a different color scheme for a particular page than the one defined for the set of public or private pages to which it belongs.

There are a few more configurable settings for your theme. You can switch the bullet style between dots and arrows and you can choose whether or not to show portlet borders by default.

Also notice themes can apply to regular browsers or mobile devices. You could create another site for mobile users attached to the http://m.nosester.com address and serve up a page designed for the smaller screens on phones.

The CSS section allows you to enter custom CSS that will also be served up by your theme. In this way, you can tweak a theme in real time by adding new styles or overriding existing ones.

The next option configures the logo that appears for your site.

Using a Custom Logo

If you want to use your own logo for a specific site, use the Logo tab. Adding a custom logo is easy: select the Logo tab and browse to the location of your logo. Make sure your logo fits the space in the top left corner of the theme you’re using for your web site. If you don’t, you could wind up with a site that’s difficult to navigate, as other page elements are pushed aside to make way for the logo.

In the logo tab, you can also choose whether or not to display the site name on the site. If you check the box labeled Show Site Name the site name will appear in the the top right corner of the page. This option is enabled by default and cannot be disabled if the Allow Site Administrators to set their own logo option is disabled in Portal Settings. It is also not available for the default site – only newly created sites and user pages have the option to have the name display.

JavaScript

If you click on JavaScript from the Site Pages interface for a page set (either Public Pages or Private Pages), you’ll find a window where you can enter JavaScript code the will be executed at the bottom of every page in the site. If your site’s theme uses JavaScript (as is usually the case), it’s best to add custom JavaScript code to the theme and not in this window. This way, all of your site’s JavaScript code remains in one place.

Using the JavaScript window of your site’s Site Pages interface may be useful if your site’s theme does not use JavaScript. In this case, the JavaScript window of your site’s Site Pages interface will contain all of your site’s JavaScript and you can add some dynamic features to your site’s pages.

Next, let’s look at an advanced feature of the Site Pages interface: merging the current site’s pages with the pages of the default site.

Advanced

If you click on Advanced from the Site Pages interface for a public page set, you’ll find an option to merge the public pages of your portal’s default site with the public pages of the current site. If you enable this option, the pages of the default site appear in the current site’s navigation bar, along with the current site’s pages. Also, the pages of the current site appear in the navigation bar of the default site, along with the default site’s pages. This “merging” of pages only affects the list of pages in the default site’s and the current site’s navigation bars. This allows users to more easily navigate from the current site to the default site, and vice versa. This option can be enabled for the public pages of both personal sites and regular sites.

Note that this “merging” of pages is not a “hard merge”. For example, suppose that the site administrators of twenty different sites on your portal all enabled the Merge default site’s public pages option. Would the pages of all these different sites be merged into each site’s navigation bar? No, that would make a mess! Instead, the portal keeps track of the current scopeGroupId (the ID of the current site) and the previous scopeGroupId (the ID of the previously visited site). If the Merge default site’s public pages option is enabled for either the current site or the previous site, the pages of the default site are merged in the pages of the other site.

For example, suppose that your portal has three sites: the default site, site A, and site B. All three sites have some public pages. Site A has the Merge default site’s public pages option enabled, site B does not. When a user first logs in, he’s directed to the default site. The scopeGroupId is that of the default site and there is no previous scopeGroupId, so no additional pages appear in the default site’s navigation bar. Then suppose the user navigates to site A. Site A has the Merge default site’s public pages option enabled, so the default site’s pages are added to site A’s navigation bar. Now if the user goes back to the default site, site A becomes the previous site so site A’s pages are added to the default site’s navigation bar. If the user navigates to site B, no additional pages appear in site B’s navigation bar because site B does not have the Merge default site’s public pages option enabled. And if the user navigates back to the default site, site B becomes the previous site, and, again, since site B does not have the Merge default site’s public pages option enabled, no additional pages are added to the default site’s navigation menu.

Next, let’s examine how to configure individual pages.

Changing Options for Individual Pages

When you select a single page, some different options appear. Let’s look at what these do.

Details: lets you name the page for any localizations you need. You can also set the HTML title that appears in the browser window for the page. Plus you can set an easy to remember, friendly URL for the page.

SEO: provides several means of optimizing the data the page provides to an indexer that’s crawling the page. You can set the various meta tags for description, keywords and robots. There’s also a separate Robots section that lets you tell indexing robots how frequently the page is updated and how it should be prioritized. If the page is localized, you can select a box to make Liferay generate canonical links by language. If you want to set some of these settings for the entire site, you can specify them from the Sitemaps and Robots tabs of the Manage Site Settings dialog box (see below).

Tip: In previous versions of Liferay, it was possible that a single page could be indexed multiple times. In Liferay 6.1, all URLs that direct to the same page will only create one entry in the index. Previously, the simple URL http://www.nosester.com/web/guest/blog/-/blogs/thenose and different versions of the URL which provided additional information about the referring page had different entries in the index. As of Liferay 6.1, each asset (web content article, blog entry, etc.) has a unique URL. From the search engine’s point of view, this will make your pages rank higher since any references to variations of a specific URL will all be considered references to the same page.]

Look and Feel: lets you set a page-specific theme.

Layout: lets you specify how portlets are arranged on a page. Choose from the available installed templates to modify the layout. It’s very easy for developers to define custom layouts and add them to the list. This is covered more thoroughly in both the Liferay Developer’s Guide and in Liferay in Action.

JavaScript: gives you the ability to paste custom JavaScript code to be executed on this page.

Custom fields: If custom fields have been defined for pages (which can be done from the Custom Fields page of the Control Panel), they appear here. These are metadata about the page and can be anything you like, such as author or creation date.

Advanced: contains several optional features. You can set a query string to provide parameters to the page. This can become useful to web content templates, which you’ll see in the next chapter. You can set a target for the page so that it either pops up in a particularly named window or appears in a frameset. And you can set an icon for the page that appears in the navigation menu.

Mobile Rule Groups: allows you to apply rules for how this page should be rendered for various mobile devices. You can set these up in the Mobile Device Rules section of the Control Panel.

Customization Settings: lets you mark specific sections of the page you want users to be able to customize.

Note that the Manage → Page Layout menu directs you to the same Layout tab that’s in Manage → Page.

Modifying Page Layouts

Page layouts allow you to arrange your pages so the content appears the way you want it to. Liferay comes with many layouts already defined. Developers can create more and they can be deployed to your portal for your use.

To prepare for the portlets we’ll soon be adding, let’s change the layout of the Collaboration page. To access layouts, select Manage → Page Layout from the Dockbar.

Now, select the 2 Columns (70/30) layout and click Save. Once saved, you’ll return to the page and it’ll seem as though nothing has happened. Once we start adding portlets, however, you’ll notice the page is now equally divided into two columns. You can stack portlets on top of each other in these columns. There are, of course, more complicated layouts available and you can play around with them to get the layout you want.

Sometimes a particular layout is almost what you want but not quite. In this case use the Nested Portlets portlet to embed a layout inside another layout. This portlet is a container for other portlets. It lets you select from any of the layouts installed in Liferay, just like the layouts for a page. This gives you virtually unlimited options for laying out your pages.

The next option in the Manage menu is page customizations.

Page Customizations

Page Customizations are a new feature in Liferay 6.1. With page customizations, any user with the appropriate permissions can create personalized versions of any public page. Before users can create personalized versions of pages, customizations must first be enabled by an administrator. Administrators can activate or deactivate customizations for any row or column on any page. When users customize a page, they have the option to use either their version or the default version of a page. Users can’t see alternate versions of pages other than their own.

Figure 2.7: Setting Customizable Columns

When an administrator activates page customizations for a page, any portlets that are in a Customizable row or column can be moved around the page or removed from the page. Users can add new portlets of their own choosing to these columns of the page and can also customize portlet configurations. If at any time users determine they don’t like their customizations, they can click Reset My Customizations to revert their pages back to the default. For more information about page customizations, please refer to the Page Customizations section of chapter 6.

Now that you know how to enable page customizations, let’s look at the settings for the site as a whole.

Configuring Site Settings

As with Site Pages, you can access Site Settings through the Control Panel or directly from the site using the Dockbar (Manage → Site Settings).

Figure 2.8: Site Settings

You’ll find options to specify details and metadata about your site, set up friendly URLs and virtual hosts, configure search engine optimization settings, turn staging on or off and specify a Google Analytics ID. Let’s take a closer look.

Details: allows an administrator to change the description and membership type of a site and also to specify tags and categories for the site. The membership type can be set as open, restricted or private based on the privacy needs of the site. Users can join and leave an open site at will. To join a restricted site, a user has to be added by the site administrator. A user can also request to be added through the Sites section of the Control Panel. A private site is like a restricted site but doesn’t appear in the Sites section of the Control Panel for users who aren’t members.

Pages: From Site Settings, click on Pages to manage some basic features of the pages on a site. If no pages have been defined yet, you can set site templates for the public or private pages. If pages already exist, links are provided to view them. You can also change the site’s application adapter, which is a special type of hook plugin that customizes out of the box functionality for specific sites.

Site URL: Set a friendly URL and/or a virtual host for your site here. The Friendly URL option lets you manage the path to your site in the portal’s URL. Friendly URLs are used for both public and private pages. For public pages, the friendly URL is appended to http://localhost:8080/web. For private pages, the friendly URL is appended to http://localhost:8080/group. Each friendly URL needs to be a unique name, of course. Having a human-readable friendly URL assists indexing bots and is critical to good search engine optimization.

For example, suppose you were creating a portal for a bank called the Best Bank. If you set the friendly URL of your portal’s default site to /best-bank, the URL of your default site’s public home page would change to http://localhost:8080/web/best-bank/home. If your portal’s default site had private pages, the URL of the default private home page would change to http://localhost:8080/group/best-bank/home.

Note that if you’re adding a friendly URL for your portal’s home page, you should update your portal’s Home URL field so that page requests to http://localhost:8080 redirect properly. To do this, navigate to the Portal Settings page of the Control Panel and find the Home URL field in the Navigation section. For our bank example, we would enter /web/best-bank/home into the Home URL field. Once you’ve entered this setting, page requests to localhost:8080 will redirect to the friendly URL of your portal’s new homepage: http://localhost:8080/web/best-bank/home.

Virtual Hosts make web navigation much easier for your users by connecting a domain name to a site. This tab allows you to define a domain name (i.e., www.mycompany.com) for your site. This can be a full domain or a subdomain. This enables you to host a number of web sites as separate sites on one Liferay server.

For instance, if we set this up for Nose-ster’s Development Network, users in that site could use developers.nosester.com to get to their site, provided Nose-ster’s network administrators created the domain name and pointed it to the Liferay server.

To set this up, the DNS name developers.nosester.com should point to your portal’s IP address first. Then enter http://developers.noseter.com in the Virtual Host tab for the Developers site. This helps users quickly access their site without having to recall an extended URL.

Site Template: If you’ve created the site from a site template, this section displays information about the link between the site template and the site. Specifically, you can see which site template was used and whether or not it allows modifications to the pages inherited from it by site administrators. If you’re not using site templates for this site, you can safely ignore this section.

Sitemap: lets you send a sitemap to some search engines so they can crawl your site. It uses the sitemap protocol, which is an industry standard. You can publish your site to Yahoo or Google and their web crawlers will use the sitemap to index your site. Liferay Portal makes this very simple for administrators by generating the sitemap XML for all public web sites.

By selecting one of the search engine links, the sitemap will be sent to them. It’s only necessary to do this once per site. The search engine crawler will periodically crawl the sitemap once you’ve made the initial request.

If you’re interested in seeing what is being sent to the search engines, select the Preview link to see the generated XML.

Robots: If you’re using virtual hosting for this site, you can configure robots.txt rules for the domain. The Robots page gives you the option to configure your robots.txt for both public and private pages on a site. If you don’t have Virtual Hosting set up, this tab is rather boring.

Staging: enables you to edit and revise a page behind the scenes, then publish changes to your site once they have been completed and reviewed. For a full explanation of Staging, see chapter 3: Advanced web content management.

Analytics: allows you to integrate your pages with Google Analytics. Liferay provides seamless integration with Google Analytics, allowing you to place your ID in one place, then it will get inserted on every page. This enables you to focus your efforts on building the page, rather than remembering to put the code everywhere. Google Analytics is a free service which lets you do all kinds of traffic analysis on your site so you can see who visits, where visitors are from and what pages they most often visit. This helps you tweak your site so you can provide the most relevant content to your users.

Now that you know how to configure sites, let’s look at page templates and site templates.

Page Templates and Site Templates

Page Templates and Site Templates are invaluable tools for building similar pages on larger portals. As you continue to add pages to sites in your portal, you’ll notice repeatable patterns in the designs of those pages. Page templates enable you to preconfigure a single page and then apply it to any new page you create. Site Templates allow you to do the same thing but on the scale of a site–if you have multiple sites that use a similar structure of pages, you can create a single site template and use it to create as many sites as desired. For a full explanation of Page Templates and Site Templates, see chapter 3.

Site Content

Liferay 6.1 makes it easier to access Web Content management without using the Control Panel. You can now click Manage and then Site Content to access the same Web Content controls featured in the Control Panel right from your portal page.

Figure 2.9: Site Content

You can manage the following kinds of content:

• Recent Content
• Web Content
• Documents and Media
• Bookmarks
• Calendar
• Message Boards
• Blogs
• Wiki
• Polls
• Software Catalog
• Tags
• Categories
• Social Activity
• Dynamic Data Lists

For details about Liferay’s social collaboration suite, see chapter 10.

Creating the Nose-ster Pages

There are a lot of other things you can do beyond placing portlets on a page. So let’s start working on the Nose-ster site. You can do this by going up to the Dockbar and clicking Go to → Nose-ster.

We’ll use the Community page you created earlier in the chapter. Navigate to the Community page and select Manage → Page from the Dockbar.

This screen should now be familiar to you but let’s recap.

The Page tab allows you to:

• Change the name of the page
• Enter HTML code for the title
• Choose the page type
• Hide the page from the theme navigation
• Define a friendly URL to the page
• Choose an icon to be displayed
• Choose a frame target for the page
• Copy an existing page

You can also enter custom meta tags or JavaScript to the page if you’re a web developer. Additionally, if you click the Permissions button, you can define which users, groups, roles or organizations can view or edit the page.

The Children tab lets you create child pages underneath the page you’ve selected. You can nest pages as deep as you like but for every page below the top level hierarchy you must provide navigation to it via a Navigation or Breadcrumb portlet, at least with most themes (including the default). Developers can create themes which have cascading menu bars which show the full hierarchy. Some examples of that are in Liferay’s plugin repositories.

For now, click Return to full page. You should be able to define and manage pages in Liferay at this point so let’s look at what you’d put on a page.

Portlets

As we discussed earlier, Liferay Portal pages are composed of portlets. All of your site’s functionality, from blogs to shopping, is composed of portlets.

Adding portlets to a page is simple. Let’s add some to our Collaboration page.

1. In the Dockbar, select Add → More.
2. In the menu that appears, expand the Collaboration category.
3. Drag the Blogs Aggregator portlet off the Add Application window onto the right column of our page.
4. Next, drag the Wiki portlet to the left column.

See how easy it is to add applications to your pages? We’ve gone one step further: we’ve got the Wiki portlet, the Blogs Aggregator portlet and then a nested portlet with a different layout and the Alerts, Search and Dictionary portlets in the figure below.

Figure 2.10: Yeah, we're showoffs. But as you can see, your page layout options are virtually limitless.

You’ll find it’s easy to make your pages look exactly the way you want them to. If the layout options provided aren’t enough, you can even develop your own. More information about that can be found in Liferay’s official guide to development, Liferay in Action.

Page Permissions

By default, public pages are just that: public. They can be viewed by anybody, logged in or not logged in. And private pages are really only private from non-members of the site. If someone has joined your site or is a member of your organization, that person can see all the private pages. You can, however, modify the permissions on individual pages in either page group so only certain users can view them.

Let’s say we wanted to create a page only for administrators to see. We can do this with the following procedure:

1. Go to the Dockbar and select Manage → Control Panel.
2. Ensure you’ve selected the default site in the context selector.
3. Click the Site Pages link.
4. Click the Private Pages tab to switch to the Private Pages. Remember, these pages by default are viewable only by members of the site.
5. Create a page called Admin Tips.
6. Click on the page in the tree on the left and then click Permissions.
7. Uncheck the View and Add Discussion permissions next to the Site Member role.
8. Click the Save button.

Figure 2.11: Permissions for Admin Tips

Congratulations! You’ve just changed the permissions for this page so only site administrators can view it. Any users you add to this role can now see the page. Other users, even members of this site, won’t have permission to see it.

Pages in Liferay are as flexible as pages you’d create manually without a portal. Using a point and click interface, you can define your site any way you want. You can create and remove pages, export and import them, set their layouts, define how they are indexed by search engines and more. You’ve also been introduced to Liferay’s concept of sites. Again, using a point and click interface, you can create multiple web sites and define how users can access them, whether they are linked to a domain name and create all of their pages.

You now understand how to manage pages in Liferay Portal. It’s time to move on to adding content to those pages. Liferay’s Web Content Management (WCM) is a highly powerful, yet flexible, set of tools that enables you to successfully manage your web site.

You’ll soon discover that Liferay’s WCM is easy to learn and highly configurable. If you already have experience with WCM, you’ll see some new features and improvements to old ones. If you’re new to Liferay’s WCM, then you’ll be surprised at how fast you will be adding, editing and scheduling content on your site. Once you’re familiar with portlets such as Web Content Display and Asset Publisher, your ability to manage an immense site with a large amount of content will simply amaze you.

We’ll be using Liferay’s WCM to publish simple pieces of content, develop templates to define how content is to be displayed, set up a workflow for content to be approved, schedule when content is to be published and much, much more.