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I am new to Liferay and am creating a service provide portal. I need some advice on how best to use the various Liferay structures to realise this portal.

Basic requirements are:

• There needs to be a main public website
  • There needs to be a public directory list of service providers
    • List must be searchable
    • Each list entry must display basic information about each service provider in a card, e.g. name, image, services provided, location etc
• Each service provider must:
  • have their own public and private website
  • have their own members

My first thinking is to create each service provider as a organization with an organization site. (The only issue I have here is that I cannot get the organization site to be public for all widgets - there seem to be permission issues in that guests do not have permissions for the widgets like calendars/dynamic lists etc in an organization site)

Then for the directory listing there seem to be multiple options which are confusing for me:

• Dynamic Data Lists
  • Is it posisble to use organisations as backing data for a dynamic list?
  • Or do I have to create an entry in a dynamic list and an organization for each new service provider?
• Collections
  • It seems that collections can be backed by a dynamic data list, but have additional capabilities like search/filter?
  • Is it then better to use thius than a dynamic data list?
  • Is there a filter widget to display the search filters?
• Content sets
  • Because each service provider will have a set of content liek text, images, links and descriptions in a card template, are content sets applicable?
• Other liferay data structure?
• Develop my own portlet
  • Would it be easier to just develop my own portlet to implement the service provider list?

Any direction would be helpful. Thank you.