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Liferay User Interface Development

Develop a powerful and rich user interface with Liferay Portal 6

Sample chapter, Table of contents, Download code

An Overview:

• Design usable and great-looking user interfaces for Liferay portals
• Get familiar with major theme development tools to help you create a striking new look for your Liferay portal
• Learn the techniques and tools to help you improve the look and feel of any Liferay portal
• A practical guide with lots of sample code included from real Liferay Portal Projects free for use for developing your own projects

Details

Liferay employs a specialized theming system, which allows you to change the look and feel of the user interfaces. As a developer, by using the right tools to create and manipulate themes with Liferay Portal, you can get your site to look any way you want it to; but the Liferay theming system can be difficult to get started with. This practical guide provides you with a well organized manual for working with Liferay as a programmer to help you get started.

Liferay User Interface Development is a pioneer in explaining Liferay's powerful theming system by taking you through examples to get you to create your own themes as quickly as possible. It focuses on how portal pages are created and styled and also discusses some simple configuration and customization to change the look and feel of a portal page. Its explicit instructions are accompanied by plenty of source code. With the open source nature of Liferay, you will find a user-friendly environment to design themes with the latest user interface technologies.

Liferay User Interface Development unlocks the potential of using Liferay as a framework to develop a rich user interface.

The book starts off with how you should go about structuring a Liferay Portal web page. It identifies the components of a portal page: theme, layout, and portlets. This hands-on tutorial explains themes, portlets, and Alloy UI, which is the latest output from the Alloy Project of Liferay, in an easy-to-understand way. It covers all aspects of a theme from its inception and rendering through its consumption by an end user, with in-depth discussion.

By the end of this book, you will clearly understand themes, layouts, and the Alloy API. Most importantly you will obtain the skills to write a theme and layout templates, apply them to a portal, and also control the portlet UI through different mechanisms.

This clear, concise, and practical tutorial will ensure that you have developed skills to become a competent Liferay themer. The detailed text is accompanied with source code that allows you to play with the examples, update the code, and add custom features.

A practical guide to customizing the look and feel of Liferay-based portal applications

What you will learn from this book :

• Learn Liferay themes inside out in a procedural way with real project example code
• Develop variations of a theme through its color schemes by getting familiar with major theme development tools
• Customize the Dockbar using Velocity templates, CSS, and the Alloy API
• Upgrade a theme from an older Liferay version to Liferay Portal 6 and change the default theme in Liferay
• Use AJAX to change page content and generate PDF and Excel reports
• Take advantage of Liferay portlet UI tags to save development time
• Use Velocity templates to control different parts of a Liferay Portal web page
• Get introduced to the latest Liferay user interface – Alloy UI
• Get acquainted with Liferay Alloy form tags and become a fan of the Alloy API
• Use UI tag libraries in your pages or portlets including CKEditor, reCAPTCHA, and more
• Design themes in WAP and production including jQuery, Workflow, Custom Attributes, Social Activities and Social Equity, WAP theme, Friendly URLs, data migration and portal upgrade, deployment, and performance tuning, etc.

Approach

This is a basic tutorial that teaches you how to use the tools provided by Liferay to create your own applications. It covers a lot of the material that has API references and documentation of the architecture and illustrates its key concepts with examples.

Who this book is written for

If you have basic knowledge of Java Web applications, know the basic operational functionality of Liferay, and have written a servlet or JSP file, you are ready to get the most out of this book. Whether you are a web portal engineer or an experienced Liferay Portal developer, you can benefit from this book. You are not expected to have prior knowledge of Liferay theming.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all team members at Liferay, specially Raymond Auge, Brian Chan, Bryan Cheung, Jorge Ferrer, Michael Young, Jerry Niu, Ed Shin, Craig Kaneko, Brian Kim, Bruno Farache,Thiago Moreira, Amos Fong, Scott Lee, David Truong, Alexander Chow, Mika Koivisto, Julio Camarero, Douglas Wong, Ryan Park, Eric Min, John Langkusch, Marco Abamonga, Ryan Park, Eric Min, John Langkusch, Marco Abamonga, Michael Han, Samuel Kong, Nate Cavanaugh, Arcko Duan, Richard Sezov, Joshua Asbury, Shuyang Zhou, and Juan Fernández for providing all the support and valuable information. Much thanks to all the friends in the Liferay community.