Liferay’s product navigation consists of the main menus you use to customize, configure, and navigate your Liferay instance. Whether you edit a page, switch to a different site scope, access a user’s credentials, etc., you’re constantly using the default navigation menus. Liferay’s product navigation is designed to be intuitive and extensive, but often times, providing a customization to a default menu is necessary to give your Liferay instance that unique touch you’re searching for. Liferay allows developers to extend and customize the default product navigation to fit their needs.
There are four main sections of Liferay’s product navigation that you can extend: Product Menu, Control Menu, Simulation Menu, and User Personal Bar.
Figure 1: The main product navigation menus include the Product Menu, Control Menu, Simulation Menu, and User Personal Bar.
As you can see from the figure above, the Product Menu is the menu to the left that displays your’s instance’s Control Panel, user account settings, and Site Administration functionality. The Control Menu is the top menu offering navigation to the Product Menu, Simulation Menu (the right menu), and Add button. When certain settings are enabled (e.g., Staging, Page Customization, etc.) more tools are offered. The Simulation Menu offers options to simulate your site’s look for different scenarios (devices, user segments, etc.). Lastly, the User Personal Bar is used to hold selectable items that aid with a user’s own account settings.
In this section of tutorials, you’ll learn about the various ways you can extend and customize Liferay’s product navigation to fit your needs.