Blogs

Well, it's a little late and yes, it's a little behind, but the first edition of the Liferay Administrator's Guide has hit the presses! Covering Liferay Portal 4.3, it goes over everything from installing Liferay to an application server to integrating it with other services, such as chat and workflow. There's a complete description in the blurb on the back of the book.

Writing a book is a huge job. I say that because were it not for the sheer number of contributors of material, this book would still not be done. Why? Because the research end of it alone (in this case, that's actually going through each feature, configuring it so it works, and writing up notes during the process) could take as long as it's taken so far. Once you have that done, however, you need to start writing.

I got a jump start on both of those tasks (the research and the writing) because of some great people who a) helped me when I couldn't get something working or b) contributed documentation for a particular feature that they already wrote.

So I am grateful for all of those (I attempted to list everyone on the inside front page, and I'm praying that I didn't miss anybody) who contributed material to the book: you were instrumental in getting it done this fast.

The Liferay Administrator's Guide is available from our web site as a free PDF download. A much, much cooler way to obtain it, though, is as an actual book, which you can get from here. That way, not only do you get a nice, portable Liferay reference you can take with you into the server room, but also you get to see the really cool picture our CEO, Bryan Cheung took in Langen, Germany, near Liferay's European headquarters. That's a special bonus that only appears on the front cover of the real book.

Before I start sounding like an As-Seen-On-TV commercial, maybe I should talk about where we go from here. This is only the beginning of the Liferay Documentation Project. Next on tap we have a Liferay Developer's Guide, which will guide the developer through the ins and outs of writing code on the Liferay Portal platform. And, of course, we need to catch the documentation up with the latest release of Liferay.

We also have several 4.4-based Lifecasts--online demos of how to use Liferay to build out a web site for your organization. These are authored by Jon Lyons, and he has done a fantastic job with them. You can access these by clicking here. I'll let him give you the details on those.

Anyway, that's why it's been so quiet around here on the documentation team--we've been heads-down trying to get these products out to you as fast as we could, with the highest quality we could. Thanks to all for your continued patience as we work on providing these resources!