You know how all these retailers advertise themselves as a “one stop shop” for anything you want? The idea is they have so much stuff that whatever you’re looking for is probably there. Liferay’s Control Panel is something like this. If you want to create users, organizations, sites, configure permissions and plugins and pretty much anything else, you can do it from the Control Panel. When signed in to Liferay as an administrator, you can access the Control Panel from the Product Menu by clicking Control Panel.
Figure 1: Administrators can access the Control Panel from the Product Menu.
The Control Panel is divided into five main areas: Sites, Users, Apps, Configuration, and System. The Users section lets you create and manage users, organizations, user groups, roles, and password policies. If monitoring has been enabled for your portal, you can also view all of the live portal sessions of your users from this area of the Control Panel. If the Audit plugins have been installed from Liferay Marketplace, the Audit section also appears.
The Users section of the Control Panel is used for most administrative tasks involving user management. There, you’ll find an interface for the creation and maintenance of the following portal entities: users, organizations, user groups, and roles.
Managing sites, teams, site templates, and page templates is covered in detail elsewhere. Remember that it’s possible and sometimes simpler to use sites, site memberships, and teams to organize users and manage permissions than it is to use organizations, user groups, and custom roles.
As a portal administrator, you’ll use the Users section of the Control Panel to create users, organizations, and user groups, implement security via roles and permissions, and administer your users. Only users with the administrator role, which is a portal scoped role, have permission to view the Control Panel. You can, however, grant permissions to view the Control Panel to existing or custom roles.
In this set of articles you’ll learn about managing users. While you could probably get started learning about managing users in Liferay just by perusing the Control Panel, there’s so much User Management functionality in Liferay that it’s tough to wrap your head around it all. Maybe a limerick can help:
There’s a company in Spain that makes Hula Hoops
They placed Users in Organizations and User Groups
They assigned them their Roles
And set them some goals
Made Password Policies that can’t be duped.
Figure 2: The Users section of the Control Panel. This screenshot shows a portal that doesn't have the EE Audit plugin installed.
Begin exploring Liferay’s User Management functionality by reading about adding and editing users.