In this chapter, we examined several Liferay utility applications: the Bookmarks portlet, the Shopping portlet, the Software Catalog, the Reports and JasperReports applications, the Knowledge Base, the Akismet application, the Weather portlet, and the OAuth application.
The Bookmarks portlet allows users and administrators to collect and share useful link to pages either within or outside of the portal. The Shopping portlet allows you to use PayPal to set up your portal for E-commerce activity. The Software Catalog allows you to define a set of software items to make available to visitors to your portal. Remember that the Software Catalog has been replaced by Liferay Marketplace. If you want to use it, you’ll have to manually install it as a plugin. The Reports application is an EE-only application that provides a Reports Admin portlet in the Control Panel for creating reports and scheduling report generation. When combined with a suitable implementation, such as the JasperReports application (also EE-only), you can upload report definitions in the Reports Admin portlet, generate reports, and export reports to a wide variety of formats.
The Knowledge Base application is an EE-only application that allows you to create articles and organize them into full books or guides that be published on your portal. The Akismet application offers a web-based spam detection service for your portal’s message boards, blogs, wikis, and comments. The Weather portlet provides users with a summary of weather-related information for multiple locations and provides a links to Open Weather Map for more detailed information for each location. Lastly, the EE-only OAuth application manages third-party applications’ access to your portal’s resources and vice versa. Next, let’s take a tour of the Liferay Marketplace and learn how to manage Liferay plugins.