As we create web content, it’s important to keep in mind that to Liferay, the pieces of content are assets, just like message board entries and blog posts. This allows you to publish different kinds of content using Liferay’s Asset Publisher. You can use the Asset Publisher to publish a mixed group of various kinds of assets such as images, documents, blogs, and of course, web content. This helps in creating a more dynamic web site: you can place user-created wiki entries, blog posts, or message board messages in context with your content. Let’s examine some of its features.
Querying for Content
The Asset Publisher portlet is a highly configurable application that lets you query for mixed types of content on the fly. By giving you the ability to control what and how content is displayed from one location, the Asset Publisher helps you to “bubble up” the most relevant content to your users.
To get to all the portlet’s options, click the Options button in the portlet’s menu (the gear icon). On the Setup tab, you can configure the Asset Publisher’s settings from the following three areas:
- Asset Selection
- Display Settings
- Subscriptions
Asset Selection allows you to configure which assets are displayed. You can set asset selection to either dynamic or manual. With dynamic asset selection, assets are automatically displayed based on certain rules or filters. For example, you can set the Asset Publisher to display only assets of a certain type or assets to which certain tags or categories have been applied. With manual asset selection, the Asset Publisher only displays assets that have been explicitly selected by an administrator.
The Asset Publisher supports a scope that restricts both manual and dynamic asset selection. The Asset Publisher can only display assets from its configured scope. By default, the Asset Publisher portlet is scoped to the site of the page to which it was added. However, you can customize the scope from the Asset Selection section of the Asset Publisher configuration window. To extend your Asset Publisher’s scope, click Select under Scope and choose either Global to add the global scope or Other Site… to add the scope of anther site.
The Display Settings section of the Asset Publisher configuration window lets administrators customize many details that determine how content is displayed. The Subscription section allows administrators to enable, disable, or configure email subscriptions and RSS subscriptions. In the following sections, we’ll explore the available configurations for the Asset Selection, Display Settings, and Subscriptions sections of the Asset Publisher’s configuration window. Let’s start by learning how select content manually. You’ll see that it’s very similar to using the Web Content Display portlet except that you can select assets of any type, not just web content instances.
Selecting Assets Manually
By selecting Manual from the select box beneath Asset Selection, you tell the Asset Publisher that you want to select content manually. You can configure multiple scopes, including the global scope, from which to select assets.
Figure 6.13: Selecting assets in the Asset Publisher manually is similar to selecting assets in the Web Content Display portlet except that you can select assets of any type, not just web content. You can also add scopes to expand the list of assets that available to be displayed in the Asset Publisher.
When selecting assets manually, you’ll see a list of configured scopes under the Scope heading. Click the red “X” button at the right to remove a scope from the list. Click the Select button to add additional scopes to the Asset Publisher’s configuration. After you’ve added a scope, a new Select button appears under the Asset Entries heading. A list of assets selected for display appears in the Asset Entries section. You can select assets to be displayed by clicking on the appropriate Select button. One button appears for each configured scope. By default, the available asset types include the following:
- Documents Folder
- Bookmarks Folder
- Blogs Entry
- Message Boards Message
- Web Content Instance
- Bookmarks Entry
- Wiki Page
- Document
- Web Content Folder
You can select any number of assets to be displayed. Note, however, that there’s a display setting called Number of Items to Display that determines the maximum number of items to display (or, if pagination is enabled, the maximum number of items to display per page). The Asset Publisher enables you to mix and match different asset types in the same interface. When you’re done selecting items to display, click Save. Any selected assets are added to the list of assets that are displayed by the portlet. Once you have your content selected, you can configure the display types to configure how the content appears. We’ll discuss the display settings in more detail after we finish discussing how to select assets for display.
While manual Asset selection allows you to select assets of various types from different scopes, it can be time-consuming to periodically update the assets that should be displayed. It’s often more convenient to use the Asset Publisher to select content dynamically.
Selecting Assets Dynamically
The Asset Publisher’s default behavior is to select assets dynamically according a set of customizable rules. These rules can be stacked on top of each other so that they compliment each other to create a nice, refined query for your content. You can define complicated rules for selecting assets for display and Liferay automatically takes permissions into account. Liferay’s Asset Publisher performs well in these situations since it queries by search index instead of querying the database directly. You have the following options for creating rules for selecting content:
Scope: Choose the sites from which the content should be selected. This works the same way as with manual asset selection: assets can only be displayed if they belong to a configured scope.
Asset Type: Choose whether you’ll display any assets or only assets of a specific type, such as only web content, only wiki entries, or any combination of multiple types.
Filter Rules: Add as many filters on tags or categories as you like. You can choose whether the content must contain or must not contain any or all of the tags or categories that you enter.
Figure 6.14: You can filter by tags and categories, and you can set up as many filter rules as you need.
Once you’ve set up your filter rules for dynamically selecting content, you can decide how the content will be displayed.
You can order the content returned by the filters by title, create date, modified date, publication date, etc. in ascending or descending order. For instance, suppose you have a series of “How To” articles that you want displayed in descending order based on whether the article was tagged with the hammer tag. Or, suppose you want a series of video captures to display in ascending order based on a category called birds. For these use cases, you can configure the ordering and grouping settings. You can also group by Asset, Type or Vocabularies. Vocabularies are groups of categories defined by administrators in the Categories section of the Control Panel.
There are also three miscellaneous display options listed as checkboxes:
- Show only assets with Welcome as its display page displays only assets specifically configured for the Welcome page.
- Include tags specified in the URL? lets you specify tags in the URL for the Asset Publisher to display.
- Include tags set by other applications lets other applications on the page toggle tags for the Asset Publisher to display.
The Ordering and Grouping section of the Asset Publisher allows you to precisely control how content is ordered and grouped when displayed. You can order the assets displayed by Asset Publisher in ascending or descending order by the following attributes:
- Title
- Create Date
- Modified Date
- Publish Date
- Expiration Date
- Priority
You can also configure a second ordering. The second ordering would be applied to any assets for which the first ordering wasn’t sufficient. For example, suppose you chose to order assets by title and there are multiple assets with the same title. Then the second ordering would take effect. For example, you could order all the assets that had the same title by their publication dates.
When ordering assets, it’s important to keep in mind that assets include different kind of entities (web content articles, bookmarks, documents, custom entities, etc.). If you’re displaying an entity which doesn’t make use of a field (e.g., publish date) and you set this field as the ordering field, your asset ordering will be incorrect.
You can establish grouping rules as well as ordering rules. You can group assets by type or by vocabulary. For example, suppose there’s a vocabulary called Membership Type that belongs to your site. Suppose this vocabulary has two categories: Premium and Regular. If you group assets by Membership Type, all assets with the Premium category will be displayed in one group and all assets with the Regular category will be displayed in another group. Grouping rules are applied before any ordering rules: they’re a way to divide up the displayed assets into separate lists. The ordering rules are applied separately to each group of assets.
Note that grouping and ordering rules are only one mechanism to control how your content will be displayed. You can refine the display through many other display settings which we’ll examine next.
Note: The following actions will have immediate effects in your Asset Publisher:
- Change the value of the Asset Selection option.
- Change the value of the Scope option.
- Select, add, sort or delete asset entries (only when selecting assets manually).
Other changes in the rest of the options will come into effect after clicking Save.
Configuring Display Settings
Open the Display Settings subtab of the Setup tab of the Asset Publisher’s Configuration window. Here, you can configure many more settings that control the Asset Publisher’s behavior and that determine how the Asset Publisher displays content. The Display Settings section gives you precise control over the display of your assets. There are many options available to configure how you want your content to appear. Many of these, such as printing, flags, ratings, comments, comment ratings, and social bookmarks work the same way they do in the Web Content Display portlet.
Show Add Content Button: When checked, this checkbox adds an Add New button that allows users to add new assets directly from the Asset Publisher portlet. This is checked by default.
Display Template: This selector lets you choose an application display template to customize how the Asset Publisher displays assets. Liferay creates the following display templates for each newly created site, including the default site:
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Abstracts: This display template shows the first 200-500 characters of the content, defined by the Abstract Length field. This is the default display template of the Asset Publisher.
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Table: This display template displays the content in an HTML table which can be styled by a theme developer.
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Title List: This display template displays the content’s title as defined by the user who entered it.
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Full Content: This display template displays the entire content of the entry.
There’s also a Rich Summary display template that belongs to the global scope. This template provides a summary view of each asset along with a Read More link to the article’s full content.
Abstract Length: Here, you can select the number of characters to display
for abstracts. The default is 200.
Asset Link Behavior: The default value is Show Full Content. With this value selected, when the link to an asset is clicked, the full asset is displayed in the current Asset Publisher. (There’s also a View in Context link that shows the article in the Wiki page’s Wiki portlet.) If the value View in a Context is selected, clicking on an asset causes that asset to be displayed in the portlet to which the asset belongs. For example, a blog entry would be displayed in the Blogs portlet where it was created. Likewise, a forum post would be displayed in the Message Boards portlet where it was created. Similarly, a generic web content instance would be displayed in the Asset Publisher of its configured display page. See the section below on display pages for more information.
Number of Items to Display: Here, you can select the maximum number of assets that can be displayed by the Asset Publisher. However, if pagination is enabled, there’s no limit to the number of assets that the Asset Publisher can display. So with pagination enabled, this number represents the maximum number of assets that can be displayed per page.
Pagination Type: This can be set to None, Simple, or Regular. With pagination set to None, the Asset Publisher displays at most the number of assets specified in the Number of Items to Display property. Setting the pagination type to Simple adds Previous and Next buttons that enable the user to browse through “pages” of assets in the Asset Publisher. Setting the pagination type to Regular adds more options and information including First and Last buttons, a dropdown selector for pages, the number of items per page, and the total number of results (assets being displayed).
Show Available Locales: Since content can be localized, you can have different versions of it based on locale. Enabling this option shows the locales available, enabling users to view the content in their language of choice.
Set as the Default Asset Publisher for This Page: The Asset Publisher portlet is an instanceable portlet; multiple Asset Publishers can be added to a page and each has an independent configuration. The default Asset Publisher for a page is the one used to display any web content associated with the page.
Enable Conversion To: If you have enabled Liferay Portal’s OpenOffice/LibreOffice integration, you can allow your users to convert the content to one of several formats:
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DOC
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ODT
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PDF
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RTF
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SXW
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TXT
Please refer to the section on Liferay Server Administration for information on setting up Liferay’s OpenOffice/LibreOffice document conversion functionality.
Enable …: The Asset Publisher’s Display Settings allow you to enable/disable the following options for displayed assets:
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Print
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Flags
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Related assets
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Ratings
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Comments
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Comment ratings
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Social bookmarks
Enabling the Print option adds a Print link to the full view of an asset displayed in the Asset Publisher. Clicking Print opens a new browser window with a print view of the asset. Enabling flags, related assets, ratings, comments, comment ratings, or social bookmarks add links to the corresponding social features to the view full of the asset in the Asset Publisher.
Show Metadata: Allows you to select various metadata types to be displayed (see below). For example, you can select tags and categories for display. Upon saving your configuration, the Asset Publisher displays tags and categories for each displayed asset. Then users can click on the tags and categories to manually filter the displayed assets.
Figure 6.15: You can configure the Asset Publisher to display various kinds of metadata about the displayed assets.
The Display Settings section of the Asset Publisher has numerous options to help you configure how your content selections are displayed to your users. Even though there are many choices, it’s easy to go through the options and quickly adjust the ones that apply to your situation. You’ll want to use the Asset Publisher to query for different kinds of assets in the portal that contain relevant information for your users.
Configuring Asset Publisher Subscriptions
The Asset Publisher portlet supports two kinds of subscriptions: RSS subscriptions and email subscriptions. To enable subscriptions, open the Asset Publisher’s configuration window (click on the gear icon and select Configuration). In the configuration window, open the Subscriptions tab of the Setup tab. There are two options:
Enable RSS Subscription
Enable Email Subscription
Enabling RSS subscription creates an RSS feed containing links to all of the assets that the Asset Publisher is configured to display. A link to this RSS feed appears in at the bottom of the Asset Publisher portlet.
Figure 6.16: When RSS subscriptions have been enabled for an Asset Publisher portlet, a link to the Asset Publisher's RSS feed appears. Users can subscribe to the Asset Publisher's RSS feed using their preferred RSS reader.
Enabling email subscription adds a Subscribe link to the Asset Publisher.
Users wishing to be notified of newly published assets can click on this link to
be added to the subscription list. Liferay periodically checks for new assets
and sends emails to subscribed users informing them about the new assets. By
default, Liferay performs this check every twenty-four hours but this can be
customized by adding the following property to your portal-ext.properties file
and changing the number:
asset.publisher.check.interval=24
Also by default, Liferay limits the number of assets that are retrieved from the
database during this check to twenty. If you’re interested in optimizing
Liferay’s performance, you can lower this limit. If you’re not concerned about
performance, you can remove this limit entirely. To customize the number of
assets about which Liferay notifies subscribed users, add the following property
to your portal-ext.properties file and change the number:
asset.publisher.dynamic.subscription.limit=20
Next, we’ll look at Display Pages, an addition to the asset framework introduced by Liferay 6.1.
Content Display Pages
If you’ve been using Liferay for a while, you might have noticed something about how Liferay handles web content–content is never tied directly to a page. While this can be useful (because it means that you don’t have to recreate content if you want to display the same thing on multiple pages), it also means that you don’t have a static URL for any web content, which is bad for search engine optimization.
As an improvement, Liferay introduced the concept of display pages and canonical URLs. Each web content entry on the portal has a canonical URL, which is the official location of the content that is referenced any time the content is displayed. A display page can be any page with an asset publisher configured to display any content associated with the page. When adding or editing web content, you can select a display page, but only pages with a configured asset publisher are available for selection.
To create a display page, you can create a page yourself, add an Asset Publisher portlet and configure it yourself. Alternatively, you can use the Content Display Page page template included with Liferay. If you’re creating a Display Page manually, once you’ve added an Asset Publisher portlet to the page, open its configuration window. Then check the Set as the Default Asset Publisher for This Page box. Also, for its display settings, set the Display Style to Abstracts and the Asset Link Behavior to View in Context.
You may now be thinking, “Wait, you just told me that each Web Content item has its own URL, and that this is somehow related to pages where we display a whole bunch of content on the same page?” That’s right. Just watch–create a display page called My Web Content Display Page somewhere on your portal, using the Content Display Page template. Now, on a different page, add a Web Content Display portlet. Click the Add Web Content button, enter a title and some content, click on Display Page at the right, and select the Display Page you just created. Then click Publish.
Figure 6.17: You can select a display page for a web content instance when creating or editing one.
In the Asset Publisher of the My Web Content Display Page, click the Read More link to display the full content. Notice that the canonical URL for content appears in your browser’s address bar. If you create your own custom display page, any additional portlets that you place on the page are displayed along with the content when you access it via the canonical URL. If you used the Content Display Page page template for your display page, it not only features a configured Asset Publisher portlet but also a Tags Navigation, a Categories Navigation, and a Search portlet. These tools help users to quickly identify relevant content.
Figure 6.18: The Canonical URL
Next, let’s learn about another new feature introduced by Liferay 6.1.