Portal Development Best Practices

[Ivan Ricotti, modificado hace 12 años.]

Hello everybody,

we're starting to develop a big portal using Liferay.
We're going to develop themes, hooks and portlets, but my question regards how to organize the following work of portal configuration and setup.
Once the portlets and themes are ready we need to deploy them on a Liferay new instance and then we're going to create the portal structure and adding contents.

I'd like to know how to organize this part of the work and avoiding to do it manually for each developer. I'd like to have a sort of configuration to run automatically, something like the 7Cogs test site.

Do you have some advice on this topic? Some best practices or experience to share about how to standardize the work?

Thanks in advance,
Ivan

[jelmer kuperus, modificado hace 12 años.]

You can do the 7cogs stuff where you insert data on startup into the database but that's an awful lot of work (and a ton of try restart, retries) and it's quite inflexible. Because changes to pages need to be done in code. And once a system is available people will start moving pages around anyway and these changes wont be reflected in your startup action. You could limit what people can do, but that kind of defeats the purpose of Liferay. One of it's strong points is that it makes it easy to add and modify pages.

We ended up making all the changes on the server available to the end user and making it easy for developers to load those changes to their development environment

Eg. there's an ant task that when invoked logs in to this server, makes a database dump, makes a tar.gz of the data folder, copies it all over to the developer workstation and updates the local portal.

That seemed to work for us.

It's unfortunate that so little information is available on the subject of end to end portal development using liferay. It would be nice if some best practices could be established and documented on the site.

[Hitoshi Ozawa, modificado hace 12 años.]

I agree with jelmer on this. 7cogs demo is not the way to go. It's nice for a static demo site, but it's very inflexible to change.
You'll have to take in consideration on Liferay revision/version up and also updates on your portlet (including database).

[Ivan Ricotti, modificado hace 12 años.]

Thanks for your replies.

Ok, so you agree regarding do not try using liferay's API or stuff like that...

Instead you suggest to have a deploy instance where add theme and contents and apply integration of new features.
This deploy instance should be under backup and also we should prepare a task to sync our single developing instances with the centralized deploy instance.

Hitoshi Ozawa:

You'll have to take in consideration on Liferay revision/version up and also updates on your portlet (including database).

May you suggest me some links?

Many thanks,
Ivan

[Hitoshi Ozawa, modificado hace 12 años.]

Sorry, as jelmer said, there isn't too many documentation of actual Liferay system maintenance.
If you've been using this forum, you'll probably experience some outrages so I think they're also
experimenting.

It's really more complicated in an actual system because of clustering and if your SLA prevents
from taking the entire system down.

FYI, you can try experimenting with staging (community) feature to distribute web contents.

[Ivan Ricotti, modificado hace 12 años.]

Thanks Hitoshi.

I see your point but, right now, the production issues is not bothering me (for now...).
I'm more interested, at this moment, in a good organisation of the developers team...

[Hitoshi Ozawa, modificado hace 12 años.]

Sorry, got carried away.
I think jelmer's suggestion is very good.
The only difference that I have is that content/theme developers usually don't change database scheme so they can just
use the shared database.
Instead of exporting/importing the entire database, it's also possible to just create sql scripts on what actually changed from the
base Liferay database scheme. Reinitialize the database periodically to make sure that all changes are actually documented
(i.e. there is a sql script from the base Liferay).