Liferay Portal is a web experience platform that contains all of the common applications you’d use as building blocks for your web site. Because of this, using Liferay completely changes the way you’d approach building your site, because Liferay includes all the functionality mentioned above and more. In fact, depending on what you’re building, it’s possible to build some sites without writing any code at all! If you’ve got a great application in mind, then Liferay is also a fantastic web application development platform that you can use to your advantage to release your application faster. Why? Because you can focus on your application, and use the user management, security, standards support, and general features provided by Liferay Portal without having to write them yourself.
Of course, there are more features than just those. You can take advantage of functionality enabling users to connect with each other in social networks, to collaborate on whatever interests them, to create content, and so much more. In fact, it’ll take this whole book to describe fully what Liferay can do, but we’ll summarize it as best we can in the rest of this chapter.
In short, Liferay Portal is more than a development platform, more than a content management system, more than a social network, and more than a set of collaboration tools. It’s the best way to build a web site.