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...
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Microsoft Excel is the de facto standard spreadsheet tool used by businesses around the world and houses some of the most critical business information. However businesses often struggle to make this information available to employees and other stakeholders that would benefit from having access to this information. An enterprise portal such as Liferay is a framework for integrating...
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A very large gift given to us user interface developers in Liferay 6.1 is the inclusion of SASS support. One of the many ways SASS comes in handy is handling prefixed CSS rules – instead of having to specify each rule every time you, say, want to declare a gradient, you can just write one mixin and have SASS do the heavy lifting. Here's a farirly straightforward linear gradient mixin I...
Read More About Making SASS Linear Gradient Mixins Behave in IE »

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... ...
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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 »

If you spend any time in blogs or in online I.T. press you hear Big Data, scalable solutions, and NoSQL databases all the time.  One popular NoSQL database solution is Mongo DB. Mongo is "document-based", not "table-based".  It requires no pre-existing schema.  It creates document databases on-the-fly, with the first addition.  These let Mongo scale very well...
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In web development and marketing, A/B testing or split testing is an experimental approach to web design (especially user experience design), which aims to identify changes to web pages that increase or maximize an outcome of interest (e.g., click-through rate for a banner advertisement). As the name implies, two versions (A and B) are compared, which are identical except for one variation...
Read More About Conducting A/B testing using Google Content Experiments with Liferay »

Identity Provider Custom Assertions After a request by a customer to provide custom attributes for an Identity Provider initiated login, I looked into what it would take to provide the attributes that were requested (a brief introduction to SAML can be viewed  here ). There are several ways to create custom attributes for a SAML assertion. The property...
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Liferay v6.1 introduced a new end-user customization capability wherein we can create a customizable page in a site that allows an end-user to add or remove portlets on the page or drag and drop portlets in different places on the page. In order to enable customization for a page, just go to Control Panel -> Site pages -> Select the page -> Customization Settings (or navigate...
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