An Introduction to Liferay

Liferay Introduction

Let’s move with an Introduction to Liferay. Liferay Portal is the world’s leading enterprise open source portal framework, offering integrated Web publishing and content management, portlet management, an enterprise service bus and service-oriented architecture, and compatibility with all major IT infrastructure. It is primarily used to power corporate intranets and extra-nets.

Liferay has lots of cool features out-of-the-box, a modern UI, extensible, customizable, works with existing AS, DB, OS, etc etc. But I believe the biggest differentiators are a healthy open source community, excellent price point, constant innovation, and great customer service.

• It comes bundled with great features out of the box like blogs, forums, social networking, document and media manager etc. And plus you can customize all this. For doing that you need to understand Portlet development.
• Liferay themes allow you to create great-looking websites.
• Liferay is an open-source platform that allows you to create websites. You can download and run it in no time.
• To elaborate further, it’s a portal platform. A portal allows you to aggregate content from different sources. So you can have multiple web applications (Portlet applications) on the same page. Like blog, weather, wiki etc. It’s also easy to use the features/functionality as a service.

Liferay has a robust platform, plugins, and dynamic architecture to meet the most advanced demands of modern enterprises. This makes it the go-to technology for enterprise portal development.

Why use Liferay?

• Liferay is extremely popular amongst the developer community as well.
• Liferay offers an extremely instinctive and easy-to-use interface. Changing the look and feel, theme, or page layouts is a matter of a few clicks. The repositioning of tools and elements of the portal can be easily done through simple drag-and-drop. With its wide-ranging collection of out-of-the-box tools, businesses can start building effective business solutions almost immediately.
• Liferay offers security making it a preferred choice for not only small and medium-sized enterprises but also global financial and insurance companies, government agencies, and also the Department of Defense.
• It comes with many built-in features that help companies address most of their common needs including web publishing, collaboration, social networking, administration, etc. Organizations hugely benefit from such a low total cost of ownership.
• Its lightweight nature makes configuration and implementation easier.
• It can integrate all different systems for the end-users and make it accessible through the portal by logging in using the Secure Single Sign On.

Versions of Liferay

Let’s start with an explanation of Liferay’s versions. Liferay comes in two editions: one for the community and one for enterprise users. Let’s deep dive into both of them.

• Liferay Community Edition: Liferay community is diverse and rich. Liferay Community Edition is a standard version mostly used for small enterprises non-sensitive to ongoing feature updates and typically non-critical to high performance. Starting small is a nice privilege for those who make the first steps with a far-reaching vision.

• Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition: Liferay EE works well for heavily modified portals like a large localization agency with a dozen of offices around the world. The cornerstone of the Liferay enterprise portal is improved stability associated with multiple offices located in different time zones. It is the paid-only portal with an enterprise license perfectly suitable for demanding production environments. Size doesn’t matter if you are an enterprise. EE works equally well for all applications.

How to install Liferay on Ubuntu?

Download Liferay using the command as under:

get https://releases.liferay.com/portal/7.3.1-ga2/liferay-ce-portal-tomcat-7.3.1-ga2-20200327090859603.tar.gz

check the readme file in (after downloading Liferay portal)

~/Downloads/liferay-ce-portal-tomcat-7.3.1-ga2-20191111141448326/liferay-ce-portal-7.3.0-ga1/ folder

Install Open JDK 8

sudo apt install openjdk-8-jdk

Extract the Liferay portal .zip file. Copy the folder liferay-ce-portal-7.3.0-ga1 to your home path. And go inside the folder path as shown below:

cd ~/liferay-ce-portal-7.3.0-ga1/tomcat-9.0.17/bin

Start tomcat

sh startup.sh

After the server is started, go to http://localhost:8080/. You will redirect to the Liferay portal.

Conclusion

With the help of Liferay, we can create any number of custom sites. We can easily create sections like web content, blog content, etc, and share between those sites. In this blog, we have learned to know simple things about Liferay. Stay connected to learn in detail by clicking here.