Recently a client asked about the differences between Liferay and social community products. Great question! Here are some points based on our work with customers. Social community products are narrowly focused and track social interactions well, but do not provide the breadth and depth that Liferay does from a web platform perspective. This results in situations where social...
Read More About Comparing Liferay and social community products »

This is part 3 of a series written for UI-dev/FED new to Liferay. This assumes you’re solid with css/html/javascript, and have at least a passing understanding of dynamic languages like PHP or ASP. If you have a Java background, you may want to skip the parts that explain stuff you already know. This post builds on the last posts , so if you haven't read those, you might want to go back and...
Read More About Tutorial: Advanced Navigation in Liferay Themes - Part 3 »

This is part 2 of a series written for UI-dev/FED new to Liferay. This assumes you’re solid with css/html/javascript, and have at least a passing understanding of dynamic languages like PHP or ASP. If you have a Java background, you may want to skip the parts that explain stuff you already know. This post builds on the last post , so if you haven't read that one, you might want to go back...
Read More About Tutorial: Advanced Navigation in Liferay Themes - Part 2 »

This is part 1 of a series written for UI-dev/FED new to Liferay. This assumes you’re solid with css/html/javascript, and have at least a passing understanding of dynamic languages like PHP or ASP. If you have a Java background, you may want to skip the parts that explain stuff you already know. When you first open a basic Liferay template like portal_normal.vm, the navigation’s usually...
Read More About Tutorial: Advanced Navigation in Liferay Themes »

Twitter is now ubiquitous in the social landscape. More and more organizations are showing twitter feeds in their external facing sites. In a recent project, I was tasked with the integration of Twitter tweets into an Enterprise Portal. In this blog post, I am going to walk through the steps for installing and setting up the twitter portlet from the Liferay Marketplace. As you explore the...
Read More About Tweet! Tweet! Need to Integrate Twitter feeds into Liferay? »

In this post (my second post in a series on Elastic Search and Liferay) we are going to see how to  install and configure Elastic Search on our computer and perform simple queries. I am going to use  0.19.4 version in Windows, but the process is really similar with other versions / platforms. Follow these steps: Select and download a version of Elastic...
Read More About Creating a simple Elastic Search cluster »

Traditionally, building portals and/or web sites with "search that just works" has been hard but over the last few years, life has become easier. Various search tools such as Lucene and Solr have emerged, and platforms such as Liferay have integrated with them to provide the kind of search capabilities that I and my customers/users expect - fast, east to set up, easy to scale, and easy to...
Read More About Elastic Search: A distributed RESTful Search Engine »

There are many tools for monitoring applications. One that we may want to use is JAMon , the Java Application Monitor; it can be really useful for discovering what the hell is going on in our application. We are going to view a quick introduce in it. But first, a little words about JAMon . I think that's not the JAMon I'm talking about... ...
Read More About Introducing monitoring applications: JAMon »

Twitter Bootstrap is a popular, easy-to-use front-end framework that not only allows for rapid prototyping, but also comes with a robust set of features that let you easily implement a responsive design. If you're building a site from scratch, all you have to do is include the Bootstrap CSS and JavaScript, and you're off to the races! When you're working with Liferay, though, it's a...
Read More About Building Responsive Layouts in Liferay with Twitter Bootstrap »

Liferay has out-of-the-box OpenOffice integration which is robust and works very well for converting web content to a variety of document formats, including PDF. However, this approach requires you to have a separate OpenOffice server running, which may not be desired or feasible. Using JTidy and Flying Saucer (xhtmlrenderer), it's very easy to implement a nice self-contained...
Read More About Converting Liferay Web Content Articles to PDFs without OpenOffice »