User Personal Sites

By default, newly created users in Liferay are each granted a personal site. Each user functions as the site administrator of his or her personal site. Personal sites are fully customizable but cannot have more than one member. The public pages of personal sites provide a space for users to add content and applications that they’d like to make accessible to anyone, including guests. User blogs are often placed on public personal site pages. Content and applications that users would like to reserve for personal use are often placed on the private pages of personal sites. For example, each user can add a Documents and Media portlet to his or her private pages and use it as an online private file repository.

If you’d like to disable personal sites for your portal, just add the following properties to your portal-ext.properties file:

layout.user.public.layouts.enabled=false
layout.user.private.layouts.enabled=false

Note: The public and private page sets of personal sites are handled separately. You can leave one page set enabled while disabling the other.

What if you initially had user personal sites enabled for your portal but then disabled them? Each existing user’s personal site remains on your portal until the next time they log in, at which point it’s removed.

You can allow users to create personal sites but not have them automatically created for new users. To do this, first make sure that layout.user.public.layouts.enabled and layout.user.private.layouts.enabled are not set to false. You don’t need to explicitly set them to true–true is the default. Then add the following properties to your portal-ext.properties file:

layout.user.public.layouts.auto.create=false
layout.user.private.layouts.auto.create=false

If the properties layout.user.public.layouts.enabled, layout.user.private.layouts.enabled, layout.user.public.layouts.auto.create, and layout.user.private.layouts.auto.create are all set to true, which is the default, then users will have personal sites and public and private pages will be automatically created for new users. There are number of portal properties you can use to customize the automatically created pages. You can customize the names of the default pages, the portlets that appear on the pages, the themes and layout templates of the default pages, and more. Please refer to the Default User Public Layouts and Default User Private Layouts sections of the portal.properties file for details. You can find an HTML version of the this file here: http://docs.liferay.com/portal/6.2/propertiesdoc/portal.properties.html.

Note: Prior to Liferay 6.1, administrators could disallow users from being able to modify the pages and portlets of their personal sites by setting the following properties:

layout.user.public.layouts.modifiable=true layout.user.private.layouts.modifiable=true

As of Liferay 6.1, this property is obsolete. However, you can customize the modifiable portions of personal sites through Liferay’s permissions system by removing permissions from roles. To disallow all portal users from modifying something, remove the relevant permission from the User role.

Historically (prior to Liferay 5.1), only power users received personal sites. Back then, they were called personal communities. If you’d like only power users to receive personal sites, add the following properties to your portal-ext.properties file:

layout.user.public.layouts.power.user.required=true
layout.user.private.layouts.power.user.required=true

Personal sites are a dynamic feature of Liferay Portal. They allow users to manage and customize their own pages and content on your portal. Next, let’s look at how users can customize applications.