Blogs

Introduction So recently I was helping a client eliminate some FreeMarker from their site. As many who have read my blogs, I'm a quick one to call out "FreeMarker Abuse!" when I find that folks are doing things in FM that Liferay never intended (i.e. making any additional service calls). Liferay's intent with supporting FreeMarker is that you are just...

Introduction So recently I wrote the blog, Gradle 7 is here! Yay? where I showed how to update your workspace to Gradle 7.3.3, and I just kind of stopped there. I mean, I kind of assumed that as developers we might just be interested in having our toolchains up to date (we all know how infosec teams react when they find out we're using outdated tools). So other than...

Introduction It started with a simple Liferay Community Slack post by Pierre Beule: Hello, I am using pretty standard Liferay stuff to generate a Liferay configuration (let's say a GROUP scoped configuration for instance). package com.test; import aQute.bnd.annotation.metatype.Meta; import ...

Just a quick post today about the new Blade 5.0 release... It's out now, and you can update your local Blade using the blade update command. This new release supports JDK 11.0.20+ (so you don't have to manually massage your settings.gradle files to support it), plus for new workspaces it will use Gradle 7 (7.3.3) as well as the latest workspace plugin versions. For...

Introduction So for some time now, Liferay builds have been stuck on Gradle 6. Which, you know, is 2 releases behind the currently available Gradle 8... But, after a lot of work, Liferay is ready to release support for Gradle 7. Gradle 7? Yes, that's right, I wrote Gradle 7, not Gradle 8. Apparently the release of Gradle 8 occurred some time after the...

This article explains how to leverage the new ECMAScript modules feature (from now on will be referred to as ESM), Custom Element and Import Map Entry client extensions in Liferay DXP to achieve the same goals possible in the AMD architecture (and more). The motivation for this article is that, with the new ESM/client extensions architecture, the things we were used to doing with...

Problem: Using custom fields for custom entities? However, the Liferay control panel does not provide a way to determine how many custom fields there are for custom entities.   Solution: Just add a single component, and it is done.   On this branch, I have created a sample component that can be deployed quickly into liferay. Once it is deployed, it will add ...

Introduction So if you really want to set off a firestorm with geeks like myself, step into the group and say "VI is better than Emacs!" Be sure to turn and walk away quickly or you might find yourself included in the tussle. Another way to set off a firestorm is to mention ChatGPT. Some like it, some hate it. I'm not really going to cover whether it is...

What is a Collection Provider? Collection providers group items into collections for display on your pages. Several are available out-of-the-box, or you can create them using the Information Framework to group items into the collections you need. Learn more at Collection Providers. What is Blueprints? People can use Search Blueprints to customize the search query...

NOTE: Please read to the end of the blog, there are important updates that affect developers, don't just stop at the conclusion... Introduction So, the various flavors of Java have just released the shiny new version, 11.0.20. Like many, I'm sure, I tried to start up Liferay with this new JDK and hit an exception at startup: Caused by:...

Introduction Recently I've been helping folks on the community slack and forums who have faced a common issue. At startup, they reach an exception, java.lang.IllegalStateException: Unable to get default company ID and then everything grinds to a halt. One thing they all have in common is they are using either 7.4 CE GA77 or later or 7.4 DXP U77 or later. ...

Starting with Liferay Portal 7.4 CE GA81 and Liferay DXP 7.4 Update 81, on-premise deployments can operate with Elasticsearch 8 as the search engine. This capability is provided by leveraging the REST API compatibility mode of Elasticsearch 8 through the bundled Elasticsearch 7 connector and other enhancements implemented for Elasticsearch-only features like Commerce,...

Publication Framework of Liferay is one of the powerful feature which helps us to track the change set, review and publish it (Refer). By default Liferay provides this feature which is already enabled with many of the out of the box modules like WebContent, Blogs, etc.. We can also use this feature with our Custom Entity by Integrating Publication Framework with our Custom module. ...

As AI has become paramount recently and Liferay DEVCON 2023 is about to get started, it is exciting to highlight this recent release and to promote the feature from development to beta phase. Since the first demo of the prototype and the live session delivered on /dev/24 last year, further enhancements have been made and now Semantic Search can be enabled as beta...

Introduction Several months ago I wrote an article about Site Initializers (read if you missed it 😉). It describes how to setup content using Bundle Site Initializer. And it also highlights (in article itself and in comments) that the main issue with Site Initializers was missing "update" support: if any changes to content required - site should be re-created from the...

Since Liferay introduced Stylebooks, the Best Practice for your installation has changed, to no longer deploy your own theme, but rather use a stylebook and change it to adhere to your Corporate Identity. Using someone else's CSS classes is quite a task - in fact, even my own CSS classes from more than 1 day ago are hard to remember: Where exactly is the hyphen? Was the prefix...

Introduction So I'm going to be putting together a series of blogs on new things that are available in Liferay 7.4, but I realized after starting a blog on Objects that I need to take a step back and instead start with what Liferay calls DSLQuery... DSLQuery is really an acronym for Domain Specific Language Query, because the foundation is based upon using a domain ...

If you've ever repeatedly gone through a checklist, with programming knowledge: How often did you have to repeat the steps until you automated them? Or, without programming knowledge: How often did you repeat them until you wished for them to be automated? I'm working in Liferay's Sales Engineering team. And in this role, I constantly set up new servers and install demos - and I'd...

Another short one today, this one is due to something shared with me by my good friend Olaf Kock... It starts with a question - do you like waffles? Or, more specifically, do you like the Liferay Waffle Menu? It starts with the little waffle icon:  And from there, you get to your Applications menu: Or even your Control Panel: I do like the waffle menu,...

Liferay Objects can generate service layers by simply declaring schema in the Liferay control panel. Liferay makes the Object's content accessible via headless APIs as well. On Notifications with Liferay Objects, I've already written one blog post. I'll go over the fundamentals of objects, mappings, and Layouts in greater depth.     Create Objects Go to Liferay's...