Blogs

I made a slight change to the login portlet that gives the user the option to create their own password, instead of always having a random password emailed to them at creation time. To enable this new functionality, edit portal-ext.properties and paste this line: login.create.account.allow.custom.password=true Keep in mind that this is for 5.2.3+, or trunk revision 26905+.

After some time of using our message boards, I have realized that when you are searching for something it isn't very clear what scope you are in. I have made some changes (http://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-2501) that will help clear up the ambiguity a little bit. This is how searching looks now:   Notice the search button text, how it is now clear if you are...

JSF has a simple Inversion-of-Control (IoC) container called the JSF Managed Bean Facility (MBF). Although it has a verbose XML syntax, and is not as robust as the Spring BeanFactory, PicoContainer, or the JBoss Microcontainer, the MBF does have the basics of an IoC container, and offers features like dependency injection. When a POJO is managed by the JSF MBF,...

This is a worker at my hotel who helped me replace my laptop hard drive. It was 4 am and I had given up because I didn't have a small screwdriver. We tried everything. Finally, he creatively used pliers and a large screwdriver to replace my Sony laptop hard drive. Not an easy thing to do. I had a 250 gb ocz solid state hard drive. It's fast for email usage,...

Here are some pictures of our new India office. It's in the Raheja Arcade, smack in the center of the Koramangala, the IT district of Bangalore. I was deeply humbled to witness our expansion into India. In these tough economic times, not too many companies are expanding. We've been blessed to be a leader in the open source portal and collaboration space, where demand has actually gone...

My stay in India was much more comfortable this time around than two years ago. Infrastructure is improving. My hotel was quite nice. In fact, it's as nice if not nicer than what I have at home. I stayed at the Iris Hotel, where the rest of the speakers of JAX India stayed. We were on Brigade St., the happening street in town. It is the equivalent of Michigan Ave. in...

Woopra is a powerful tool in beta stage now. See http://www.woopra.com/ for more information. To use it in liferay, currently you need to apply a account and active it on wroopa site.  Then you need to get the code from personal page and add it to liferay pages, for example in \html\common\themes\bottom-ext.jsp Now, you can live tracking your site in woopra gui. ...

When people say JVM tuning, most of the time they mean tuning GC. Before we start to tune JVM for Liferay Portal, let us talk about some basic conceptions of GC. As we all know jvm can handle useless memory block automaticly, this release us from manually free useless memory blocks which is the NO.1 burden for all C and C++ programmers. With the help from GC our life is much easier,...

  Portal Pack makes life easier yet again !!. This time with the NetBeans Hook Plugin for Liferay. Available @ Netbeans PortalPack 3.0.2 Introduction: This plugin has been developed to provide hook tooling support through Netbeans Portal Pack. For more information on Liferay Hook checkout the Portal Hook Plugins Wiki This new feature will help creating different kinds...

From the pen of my daughter (age three):  

If you're as cutting edge as our own Jonathan Neal, you might have downloaded the IE8 final that was released this morning at 9am PST. IE8 is a HUGE improvement towards standards, and while it still has not caught up with Firefox, Safari, Chrome or Opera, when it comes to IE, we will take what we can get :) However, since it's more accurate with the standards, you may have...

 I have been recently working on the very interesting task of making the Liferay database shardable.  What does this mean?  There is a good introduction to shards here, but basically it is a way of scaling your database horizontally.  For a given table or set of tables, you split up the data that is stored and fetched based on a given hash or something like that....

I have been in LA more than one month for a new employee training. I graduated on Jan 15th 2009, then start my first job at liferay I like this company and all people here, i really have a good time in LA(In my big boss's home Thanks Brian and Caris!). My coworkers are very nice, My bosses are kindness and full of knowledge. I can learn a lot from them. I am very happy to get...

The service builder framework in Liferay represents the database layer and all the interactions with database are done through service builder infrastructure. So in this blog, I will explain how you can use service builder framework inside your custom portlet using NetBeans 6.5 & Portal Pack 3.0. To use service builder framework, you first need to create a service xml and then...

[PS: this is my personal opinion and should not reflect in anyway the great company I work for.] Quite often we hear the saying that a person is the product of their environment. We all know that everyone is unique and that this uniqueness boiled together with the events and experiences of a lifetime which make for truely unique individuals. That being said,...

It's a humbling reminder that Java, AJAX, and the latest Saturday Night Live skits aren't on Time's list of ten ideas changing the world right now. Sure, no one doubts that technology (and especially 2.0 technology) has been revolutionary, or that funny TV shows are a good way to relax. It's just a joyful reminder that we live in a big big world, and that big timeless...

Alot of people seem to have problems deploying custom plugins to liferay. I admit that deployment can be a little tricky. First off, Liferay has a naming convention which is more than just a naming convention and is actually designed to impose behavior. I think that in the future this should be changed to be based strictly on metadata contained in descriptors. Anyway, that...

New to the next release of 5.1 and 5.2 are more streamlined templates. We’ve condensed all the includes and some code into 2 includes to cut the confusion and the clutter. Though a small update, I thought it would be important to let anyone who is developing a theme in Liferay know because some lines of text have been moved around and this could cause some needless frustration. In...

Hi everybody, I thought it might be interesting to share some info about the last development I've been involved on these last days. This development has been sponsored by a client and consists on a new functionality in the portal which will allow users to flag content as inappropiate. There will be a red flag icon near to several contents (blogs and message boards by now, and...

Perhaps as a secondary title I should put: "Why is every Liferay plugin writtin in plain old JSP?". There is a very big trend toward wanting to build portlets using some form of fancy framework. It is a seductive notion. One filled with all manner of "potential" benefits. There is also a very dangerous side effect. One that we don't initially consider, at least not until too much...