Upgrading Your Theme from Liferay Portal 6.1 to 7.0

This tutorial guides you through the process of upgrading your 6.1 theme to run on Liferay DXP 7.0.

For a more in depth tutorial that covers upgrading 6.2 themes, please see the Upgrading Themes tutorial.

Setting Up Your Theme With Liferay Theme Generator

You’ll use Liferay Theme Generator to get the upgrade process started. Liferay Theme Generator supplies your theme with the necessary tools to deploy and make quick modifications.

In this tutorial, you’ll use Liferay Theme Generator’s Import feature to help set up the upgrade process.

Preparing Your Theme

Before you import your theme, you need to make some modifications to your theme to ensure Liferay Theme Generator sets up the correct version and template language.

Make sure these settings are present in your theme:

  1. Open your liferay-look-and-feel.xml file and make sure the template language (vm, ftl, jsp) is defined:

    <look-and-feel>
        ...
        <theme id="my-theme-name" name="My Theme Name">
            <template-extension>vm</template-extension>
            ...
    
  2. Also in liferay-look-and-feel.xml, set the theme version to 6.2+:

    <look-and-feel>
        <compatibility>
            <version>6.2+</version>
        </compatibility>
        ...
    
  3. Finally, open your liferay-plugin-package.properties file and update the Liferay Portal version to 6.2+, as well:

    liferay-versions=6.2+
    

Now that your theme is prepped, you can start the import process next.

Importing Your Theme

Follow these steps to import your theme:

  1. Install Liferay Theme Generator and its required dependencies, as explained in the Liferay Theme Generator tutorial.

  2. Navigate to the folder where you want your theme imported:

    $ cd /where/i/want/my-theme/imported
    
  3. Import your theme by running this command:

    $ yo liferay-theme:import
    
  4. Follow the prompts to complete your theme import.

Your theme has been imported into a folder named after your original theme. For example, a theme named my-awesome-theme-for-61 would be imported into a folder called my-awesome-theme-for-61-theme.

Next, you can learn how to update your theme for 7.0.

Updating Your Theme For 7.0

Now that you’ve successfully imported your theme, you have the tools necessary to develop your theme for 7.0. These tools are provided by the Liferay Theme Tasks, part of the Liferay JS Theme Toolkit.

The first of these tools you’ll use is the Upgrade task. This task does a few things:

  • Backs up your files so you can revert them later if needed.

  • Modifies and renames some files for compatibility.

  • Creates a css.diff file under /_backup, so you can easily see what’s been changed.

  • Updates NPM dependencies.

  • Creates a “compatibility” file for Compass mixins, which may have been used in your 6.1 theme.

Upgrade your theme, by running these commands:

$ cd my-awesome-theme-for-62-theme

$ gulp upgrade

If the Upgrade task didn’t update your files like you expected, you can easily revert them back using the Upgrade Revert task:

$ gulp upgrade:revert

The Upgrade task automates some of the steps for you, but some manual changes are still required. These are covered next.

Additional Manual Changes To Your Theme

When the Upgrade task finishes, the console may output additional manual changes you may need to make to your theme.

There are likely changes that you still need to make, which these tools and this guide can’t realistically cover. Therefore, it’s recommended that you make changes gradually, rather than all at once. This allows you to more easily identify any issues your theme may have.

Please refer to the Appendix below for ways on how to update your theme manually.

Follow the instructions in the next section to build and deploy your theme.

Building And Deploying Your Theme

Follow these steps to build and deploy your theme:

  1. To check that everything is running smoothly, run this command:

    $ gulp build
    
  2. If all goes well, you can now deploy your theme by running this command:

    $ gulp deploy
    

If you’re using Velocity as your template language, you’ll notice this message on your server console when deploying your theme:

Support of Velocity is deprecated. Update your theme to use FreeMarker for forward compatibility.

It’s recommended that you migrate to using Freemarker for your theme templates. For more details, please see the Upgrading Theme Templates section in the Appendix.

Additional tasks and info can be found in the Liferay Gulp Tasks reference guide.

Congratulations! You’ve now completed a major step in upgrading your theme.

Appendix: Making Manual Compatibility Adjustments To Your Theme

This appendix covers the changes you need to make to your theme if you manually update your files, or if you need to make additional changes after using the Liferay JS Theme Toolkit’s Upgrade task.

Upgrading Theme Metadata

Your theme contains metadata about its capabilities and requirements. This metadata needs to be updated to ensure your theme is available for use in Liferay DXP.

Liferay Portal Version

Your theme must target the proper Liferay DXP version: in your case, 7.0.0+. You must update the theme version in two places:

  1. In the file liferay-plugin-package.properties, add the following property to ensure Liferay DXP deploys your theme:

    liferay-versions=7.0.0+
    
  2. Add the following version information to your liferay-look-and-feel.xml to ensure Liferay DXP makes your theme available for use:

    <look-and-feel>
        <compatibility>
            <version>7.0.0+</version>
        </compatibility>
        ...
    

Template Extension

If you’re not using the default Theme Template language, Freemarker (.ftl), you must add a template-extension tag to your liferay-look-and-feel.xml file:

<look-and-feel>
    ...
    <theme id="my-theme-name" name="My Theme Name">
        <template-extension>vm</template-extension>
        ...

Required Deployment Contexts

If you have any Required Deployment Contexts listed in your liferay-plugin-package.properties file, these will likely need to be removed.

  • resources-importer-web: Portal Compatibility Hook is for previous versions of Liferay Portal.

  • portal-compat-hook: Because this tutorial is focused on upgrading a theme rather than importing content and assets, it does not cover the Resources Importer. You can learn more about the Resources Importer in the Importing Resources with a Theme tutorial.

Upgrading Stylesheets

An Important Note About “Core” Stylesheets

If you’ve made customizations to “core” Liferay DXP stylesheets, it’s recommended that you not use these customizations right away. Liferay DXP’s UI has changed significantly since version 6.1, and any customizations you may have are either not likely to work, or will cause problems in the UI.

These “core” files would be:

  • application.css

  • aui.css

  • base.css

  • dockbar.css

  • extras.css

  • layout.css

  • main.css

  • navigation.css

  • portal.css

  • portlet.css

  • taglib.css

It’s recommended that you get your theme working in Liferay DXP 7.0 first, and then audit the styles in these “core” CSS files to see if they’re still necessary and don’t cause any issues.

Renaming CSS Files

Liferay DXP 7.0 now uses the .scss extension for Sass stylesheets.

  1. Under my-imported-theme/src/css, rename your custom.css file to _custom.scss.

  2. If you have any additional CSS files that need to take advantage of Sass and Bourbon, you must rename those as well.

    For example, my-feature.css becomes _my-feature.scss, and fonts.css becomes _fonts.scss.

Imported Stylesheet References

If you’ve imported any renamed stylesheets into another, you’ll want to update those references.

For example _my-fonts.scss needs to be updated from:

@import url(my-fonts.css);

to:

@import "my-fonts";

Sass Framework Import

Beginning with version 7.0, Liferay Portal now uses Bourbon for mixins, rather than Compass. Bourbon is being imported in a core stylesheet, _imports.scss, so you shouldn’t need to import it yourself.

Also, files with the .scss extension are processed by Sass automatically. But you must still import or link to these to use them.

Remove @import "compass" from all your Sass files, and don’t worry about importing Bourbon.

Mixins

When Liferay Portal switched from using Compass to Bourbon, some mixins changed syntax, became unsupported, or became unnecessary in modern browsers. These mixins should be updated or removed.

For example:

.my-component {

    @include border-radius(8px);

    @include opaque;

    @include scale(0.9);

}

input[type="text"] {

    @include input-placeholder {

        color: #bfbfbf;

    }

}

becomes:

.my-component {

    border-radius: 8px;

    opacity: 1;

    @include transform(scale(0.9));

input[type="text"] {

    @include placeholder {

        color: #bfbfbf;

    }

}

Please refer to Compass and Bourbon documentation for more details.

Bootstrap 3

If you’ve used Bootstrap 2.3.2 in your theme, a migration guide is available.

Remove .aui Class Used In Descendant Selectors

The class .aui is no longer in use. Selectors that contain .aui as a parent qualifier must be modified, or those selectors will not match the expected elements.

For example:

.aui{

    my-component {

        // ...

    }

}

.aui my-other-component {

    // ...

}

becomes:

html {

    my-component {

        // ...

    }

}

html my-other-component {

    // ...

}

or maybe:

my-component {

    // ...

}

my-other-component {

    // ...
}

Upgrading JavaScript

In August 2014 Yahoo stopped all new development of YUI, which AlloyUI was built on. Because of this announcement, Liferay has decided to sunset AlloyUI and deprecate it as of Liferay Portal 7.

Although AlloyUI is deprecated, it’s still available by default, and existing AlloyUI 3 based code continues to work.

To further research changes to an AlloyUI module, you can find a HISTORY.md file under each component’s directory.

Moving forward, it’s recommended to migrate your AlloyUI/YUI code to either Metal.js or the framework of your choice. Below, you’ll find some libraries used in Liferay DXP. Feel free to use them as well.

jQuery

jQuery is a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library. It makes things like HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax much simpler. It’s also popular among front-end developers, making it ideal for getting started quickly.

For more in depth coverage, see jQuery’s documentation.

Lodash

Lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance & extras. It’s used in Liferay DXP to fill the void left by YUI’s utility modules.

For more in depth coverage, see Lodash’s documentation.

Metal.js

Written by Liferay to specifically to meet the needs of Liferay DXP, Metal.js is a JavaScript library for building UI components in a solid, flexible way.

For more in depth coverage, see Metal.js’s documentation

Upgrading Theme Templates

In prior versions of Liferay Portal, Velocity templates (.vm files) were the default template language for writing theme markup. But Velocity had limitations. In Liferay DXP 7.0, Freemarker templates (.ftl files) are the default template language, and Velocity templates are deprecated.

With that in mind, if your themes are written in .vm files, they should still work, but you’re missing out on additional theme features. In a future release, support for Velocity templates will be removed.

Migrating to Freemarker Templates

For a typical theme, migrating to Freemarker should be simple. The syntaxes of both languages are relatively similar.

Here’s a comparison:

Velocity:

$theme.include($my_template_include)

#if ($show_site_name)

    <span title="#language_format ("go-to-x", [$site_name])">

        $site_name

    </span>

#end

#parse ("$full_templates_path/navigation.vm")

#breadcrumbs()

$theme.wrapPortlet("portlet.vm", $content_include)

#foreach ($nav_item in $nav_items)

    $nav_item.getName()

#end

Freemarker:

<@liferay_util["include"] page=my_template_include />

<#if show_site_name>

    <span title="<@liferay.language_format arguments="${site_name}" key="go-to-x" />">

        ${site_name}

    </span>

</#if>

<#include "${full_templates_path}/navigation.ftl" />

<@liferay.breadcrumbs />

<@liferay_theme["wrap-portlet"] page="portlet.ftl">

    <@liferay_util["include"] page=content_include />

</@>

<#list nav_items as nav_item>

    ${nav_item.getName()}

</#list>

Whichever language you decide to use, there are several convenient macros included with Liferay DXP:

Noteworthy Breaking Changes

There are many changes since Liferay Portal 6.1 which break in version 7.0. Some of these changes are documented in Liferay DXP’s Breaking Changes. Below are some notable ones.

Dockbar Is Now Called Control Menu

In portal_normal.vm, admin controls are now called using #control_menu().

Liferay Portal 6.1:

#if ($is_signed_in)

    #dockbar()

#end

Liferay DXP 7.0:

#control_menu()

Portlet Configuration Options

In portlet.vm, portlet menu icons have been condensed into a single call and are now controlled using the PortletConfigurationIcon classes.

Liferay Portal 6.1:

$theme.iconOptions()

$theme.iconMinimize()

$theme.iconMaximize()

$theme.iconClose()

Liferay DXP 7.0:

$theme.portletIconOptions()

See Liferay Portal’s Breaking Changes for more details:

In navigation.vm, access to icons have been changed, to minimize dependency on taglibs.

Liferay Portal 6.1:

nav_item.icon()

Liferay DXP 7.0:

$theme.layoutIcon($nav_item.getLayout())

See Liferay Portal’s Breaking Changes for more details.

Upgrading Layout Templates

The only significant change to Layout Templates has been the addition of Bootstrap’s Grid system.

If you’re using any custom Layout Templates, you’ll want to integrate Bootstrap into them.

A comparison between Layout Templates in Liferay Portal 6.1 and Liferay Portal 7.0 is shown in the example below:

Liferay Portal 6.1:

<div class="portlet-layout">

    <div class="portlet-column portlet-column-only" id="column-1">

        $processor.processColumn("column-1", "portlet-column-content portlet-column-content-only")

    </div>

</div>

Liferay Portal 7.0:

<div class="portlet-layout row">

    <div class="col-md-12 portlet-column portlet-column-only" id="column-1">

        $processor.processColumn("column-1", "portlet-column-content portlet-column-content-only")

    </div>

</div>

Themes Generator

Themelets

Importing Resources with a Theme

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