Blogs

Liferay Developer Conference and Unconference 2015 were simply great. Lots of sessions, games and chances to meet some of the most active Liferay developers. It was also very exciting and encouraging to register the attention that Audience Targeting has drawn among developers in just one year. Both the session and the workshop led by Julio, Pavel and me were packed and we...

At Liferay, we're always trying to make the life of developers easier. We're constantly improving our products and releasing new open source libraries. Helping people is what drives us. Last week we presented the Launchpad Project for the first time at Devcon. This is an initiative that we have been working for months and not many people had access to. Now, we're finally...

I'm slowly back to my regular sleep rhythm, after the highly anticipated sleep deprivation week that Devcon always is. Those ~450 participants that were there and made it the biggest and greatest Devcon so far will have seen that Liferay becomes a lot more serious in terms of messaging while still staying accessible on all levels. I've seen lots of connections being made and can...

So I'm here late one night and I'm wondering why Liferay is hosting profile pics... I mean, in this day and age we all have accounts all over the place and many of those places also support profile pics/avatars.  In each of these sites when we create accounts we go and pull our standard avatar pic in and move on. Recently, however, I was working with a site that used an...

Next week Liferay España will hold its annual Liferay Symposium in beautiful Madrid. I'm grateful to be able to attend once again, but this year will be especially awesome because of the momentum we've built over the last year in Liferay, not only due to Liferay 7, but because of the many other projects that have come together to create a true user experience platform, not just...

That's a question we get often when we tell people what we do. Answers can range anywhere from a quick pitch like "a tool that allows people to build their websites" to something more specific like "a framework for integrating information, people and processes across organizational boundaries." (Thanks, Wikipedia) Though true, those answers don't always address the...

Liferay comes with so many features that it's hard to judge when a feature is a good solution for a given problem. I'd like to shine some light onto some of these features and common misconceptions about them because it's easy to abuse them for purposes for which they're not well suited - despite making the impression they might. CC BY-ND 2.0 by S. Benno This chapter is about...

One of Liferay's more commonly used extension points is the application startup event. You can define custom code to run whenever your plugin is deployed. This is a powerful feature. In this blog post I'm going to describe a common use-case here at Ambientia, where we use these events to make sure that the custom fields the plugin is dealing with are always up to date. ...

Liferay Developer Conference (aka DEVCON) is a great chance for us to meet Liferay developers from all around the world every year. As for the last months we’ve been working on the new version of Audience Targeting, Julio and I very willingly proposed a talk about its new features and how to use them to integrate your apps with it.    But...

As a web-based platform, a portal allows users to connect with one another and find content that is relevant with ease and simplicity. It combines information from different sources into a single user interface. The portal’s functionality can provide a far-reaching impact on an organization and its processes. In fact, many companies throughout various industries are employing a...

As announced in my last blog post, the period of our milestones has finished and we are getting into the launch field with the release of Liferay 7 alpha 1. We appreciate all the feedback from the people downloading the milestones and participating in the Community Expedition program. If you haven’t sent your feedback yet, it’s never too late to make Liferay the best fit possible for...

The latest Magic Quadrant report from Gartner on the Horizontal Portal market has just been released, and you can find it here on our website. I just read it through and here’s what I noticed.   A Market Transformed First, the report opens with a strong statement on how much the portal market has changed: “The past five years has witnessed a massive transformation of...

The summer is over and it's time to crown the winners of the 2015 Liferay Screens App Contest! We had some awesome entries in the first ever contest of its kind, but two of them really stood out as great examples of the power of Screens and Liferay as a Mobile App Development Platform. So, I am honored to reveal the winners: My WiFi Directory - Sébastien Le Marchand With...

Do you remember the article that I wrote in March? It talked about Liferay's limitation to have each overloaded JSP only customizable from one hook. The limitation was not enforced, so deploying multiple hooks that overload the same JSP lead to undefined behaviour, potentially deleting the original JSP. CC BY 2.0 by David GoehringLuckily that has been fixed (currently in EE only,...

Multi-Module Projects Developers that are familiar with the version scheme of the Spring Framework will notice that each module has the same version number. For example: spring-beans-4.2.1.RELEASE.jar spring-context-4.2.1.RELEASE.jar spring-core-4.2.1.RELEASE.jar ... etc ... This is because the Spring Framework is configured as a multi-module...

The Expando API is a great tool to add custom data to the default models Liferay offers. We've used it regularly in our projects. Although the concept might overwhelm you at first, there’s no need to be scared. Let me show you around... Liferay’s models offer you a basic interface to use. For instance, when interacting with a User class, you can easily get the name, email address...

JavaServer™ Faces (JSF) is one of the standards developed under the Java Community Process (JCP) and was first introduced with Java EE 1.4. The first version of JSF had its share of proponents, but also had its share of criticism. Over the years it has been continuously improved by JCP Expert Groups (EGs) and extended by 3rd-party libraries like PrimeFaces, ICEfaces, RichFaces,...

The easily customizable, SASS based, Valo theme is one of the largest renewals to Vaadin lately. The vaadin-archetype-liferay-portlet still uses the oldish “liferay” theme, adapted for older versions of Liferay, but you can typically get much more appealing results with your Vaadin based portlets with the new Valo theme. The customizability of Valo is based on certain parameters...

Context is king In 1996, when the web was in its infancy, Bill Gates famously predicted that content would be king on the internet. Twenty years later it has become increasingly important to not just publish your content on the web, but also to understand and respond to the context and purpose with which your visitors are visiting your website. For example, an engineer...

Liferay offers extensive set of features regarding user accounts and signing in to your portal out of the box. Many of the features are made configurable through portal properties, enabling the developer to concentrate more on the core features clients want from their portals.   These options include, among others, the “remember me” feature, login by...