One of the most widely used features of Liferay is the Personal Community, aka My Community, aka Personal Space. It's a feature that allows users to have their own set of web pages, both private and public, to manage and update as they please. It's also a feature that has been challenging for developers to deal with. For example, you would like to grant certain users a Personal Community, but you want to be able to customize how it looks and what it does before you give it to them. These are the issues that were taken into consideration when version 5.1 was created!

One major update has to do with who gets a Personal Community. 5.1 jump kicks the Power User role out the window, so by default ALL users get a Personal Community. What if I want to be restrictive about who gets a Personal Space? I'm a control freak, how do I regain control over who gets a Personal Community!

Here is one quick way to do it in ServicePreAction.java.
First I have decided to overwrite the ServicePreAction class, so I've put this in my portal-ext.properties:

servlet.service.events.pre=com.ext.portal.events.CustomServicePreAction

I basically copied over the original ServicePreAction to my EXT environment and renamed it. Search for "// Layouts" inside ServicePreAction. Notice how the portal checks if you are signed in first, if you are then it checks to see whether layout.user.private.layouts.enabled is true. If layout.user.private.layouts.enabled=true, then it executes addDefaultUserPrivateLayouts(). Let's try putting in some logic that will also check if the user has the Power User role:

if (signedIn) {
               if (PropsValues.LAYOUT_USER_PRIVATE_LAYOUTS_ENABLED && 
               /* check if user has Power User role */
               UserLocalServiceUtil.hasRoleUser(RoleLocalServiceUtil.getRole(companyId, "Power User").getRoleId(),        user.getUserId()))  

                { 
                                   addDefaultUserPrivateLayouts(user);
                }
                else {
                                   deleteDefaultUserPrivateLayouts(user, companyId);
                }
               if (PropsValues.LAYOUT_USER_PUBLIC_LAYOUTS_ENABLED) {
                                   addDefaultUserPublicLayouts(user);
               }
              else {
                                   deleteDefaultUserPublicLayouts(user);
               }
}

Also make sure to modify the logic for deleteDefaultUserPrivateLayouts() to be consistent with the portal's default behavior!

protected void deleteDefaultUserPrivateLayouts(User user, long companyId)
     throws PortalException, SystemException {
         if (!PropsValues.LAYOUT_USER_PRIVATE_LAYOUTS_ENABLED && user.hasPrivateLayouts() ||
         /* if user does not have Power User role, and has a Private Community with private pages, delete the private pages */
        !UserLocalServiceUtil.hasRoleUser(RoleLocalServiceUtil.getRole(companyId, "Power User").getRoleId(), user.getUserId())&& user.hasPrivateLayouts()*/)

        {
                 Group userGroup = user.getGroup();
                 LayoutLocalServiceUtil.deleteLayouts(userGroup.getGroupId(), true);
         }
    }

Please refer here for more information on Personal Communities: http://wiki.liferay.com/index.php/Personal_Community