Getting started with Liferay Portal 6? Check out this book …

Recently Packt Publishing sent me a copy of a new book by Jonas X. Yuan titled “Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Intranets” for review. I must admit that I have not been through the book end-to-end in depth, but in the general skimming that I have done so far, it looks to be helpful for newbies/intermediate users of the Liferay Portal platform. The back cover of the book straight out states that it is NOT targeted at programmers and that shows in the content. For example, it is totally missing information on portlet development and Liferay development environment setup that can be found in Jonas’s other Liferay book titled Liferay Portal 5.2 Systems Development. With all the changes in Liferay Portal 6 related to the EXT/Plugins environment, those are certainly areas that Liferay Developers would benefit from, and maybe there will be an updated developer oriented book that will cover those topics.

In a nutshell, if you are a Liferay Portal administrator just getting started with the platform, or a technical evaluator/do-it-yourselfer working with Liferay for the first time, this book could be a handy tool in helping you getting a jumpstart with Liferay. The book has What’s Happening sections scattered throughout the content that give you a deeper insight into what you can achieve or what is happening behind the scenes. All in all – a good book if you fall in the target audience!

Check out the Packt site for more details on the book …

Liferay Portal users not able to login?

I just thought that I will blog about a common issue that afflicts people getting started with Liferay Portal. If you tie Liferay Portal to a LDAP and you have different password policies on your LDAP versus Liferay, you can run into issues with users entering a valid password for their LDAP but they still cannot login to Liferay.

Why are we creating yet another poll/survey JSR168 portlet for IBM WebSphere Portal?

***IGNORE THIS POSTING***

Do we not have enough poll and/or survey portlets in the “IBM WebSphere Portal Solutions Catalog” that we (Xtivia) need to go create yet another implementation? Obviously the answer from my perspective is that at least one more is needed by the world! 🙂 The first and foremost reason for creating yet another poll portlet (YAPP) is that none of the existing ones are free – and I like free here!  Also, the team and I  wanted to have some fun building a potentially useful portlet that is generic in nature. So here we go launching the development of a polls/survey portlet that has full multi-lingual support, polls or surveys with multiple questions, multiple question types including multiple choice questions with radio buttons, checkboxes, and drop-downs, questions with simple text entry responses, rating type questions (similar to Netflix Start rating model) and more. We will be looking to determine our distribution model for this portlet but I do expect to live up to the essential requirement of it being PRICE=FREE! I hope to share information about this development effort as the team makes progress – keep in mind though that this portlet will see functionality being built in phases over time as the team can make time for the development. I expect us to have the first version of this portlet ready by end January with a subset of the eventual functionality. And if you are interested in getting this portlet before our distribution model is ironed out, feel free to reach out to me!

September 8, 2008 Update: I apologize for this but after months of internal wrangling I still have not been able to work out the model for sharing this portlet, and being swamped with client facing work, I have had to pull the plug on sharing this portlet for now. I will revisit this when I can make some time.

Playing with Liferay II

While setting up my sandbox Liferay install, I ran into a few issues/questions that in my opinion, the docs were not too clear on.

Playing with Liferay

Took a hiatus from blogging for a whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiile! Lots of interesting things have been happening but I have been lazy in keeping up my blog. More WebSphere Portal stuff has been happening, but I will not write about it this time. Finally decided to dump the product that no IBM development team wants to own – WebSphere Site Analyzer (aka Tivoli Web Site Analyzer) and switched to AWStats for site usage analysis. I love it as does the client! On another front, started using Unison for file system replication across two physical sites that have spotty connectivity – dumped another commercial product (SureSync) in favor of an open source one. SureSync seems to work well and does a good job of real-time replication when you have good connectivity, but breaks down pretty badly across bad connections when you have large updates on a site.

However, the thing I am pretty excited about is Liferay – an open source portal solution that looks pretty promising. I looked at JBoss Portal as well, but was far from impressed with that one. JetSpeed, I have looked at earlier and passed on it. Liferay seems to have quite a good breadth of functionality out of the box – a full-blown content management system, document management, image gallery, message boards, event calendar, polls, wikis, blogs and a few others. It seems like a good fit for mostly content oriented Portals for the SMB market. The only thing that is missing is adequate documentation, but that will happen with time and community momentum (or with Xtivia‘s efforts – a plug for my employer :-)). It was a breeze getting the base product installed with bundles available with various open source Application Servers/Servlet Containers. I opted to go with the JBoss+Tomcat bundle. Setting it up to do authentication using our Windows Active Directory Server was not too bad – check out the Liferay forums if the product documentation does not cut it for you. Setting up Liferay to run as a service on Windows was as simple as using JavaService to run JBoss as a service. Setting up Liferay over SSL was as simple as putting Apache in front of Tomcat using mod_jk redirection. So far so good.

Now I need to experiment with customizing Liferay – custom portlets and custom look and feel. Will check out Liferay’s flexibility and see what is feasible in terms of layouts – will be comparing with WebSphere Portal where we have successfully implemented all kinds of layouts breaking navigation into n levels – used tabs, drop-down menus, and left navigation – all at the same time even.

Anyways – its been fun playing with Liferay!