New User Administration

Hi there!

As you may have already seen, the user/organization administration in Liferay 5.2 has been completely redesigned.

The new interface is, in my opinion, clearer, nicer and much more usable, and this has been possible because of the people in the community (thank you guys for all the suggestions, complaints and feedback) and people working for Liferay, especially Jorge Ferrer, Ray Augé and Nate Cavanaugh.

In this post, I just wanted to higlight some of the new features/improvements and explain the reasons for all these changes.

  • The design. It's soooo nice, isn't it? This is an artwork by Nate (this guy is a genius).
  • Modify everywhere, save in one place. As you can see, there can be a lot of sections in the user administration. You can move from one to another making changes in any of them and when you click on the Save Button everything will be saved.
  • Know what you are changing. Evertime you modify a section, you will see it has been modified in the menu.
  • All together with a unified UI. You will find a section for everything related to organizations, other for communities, other for user groups... and one for roles (regular roles, community roles and organization roles) yes, all together, so that you can see everything at first glance.
  • Better error management. If you save all your changes and you get an error, no one of your changes will have been saved in the server, however, you will still have all your changes in your sections (you can see they keep the modified sign). In addition, the sections with errors will show an error icon in the menu and an error message just over the field which was wrong.
  • Adding more fields dinamycally. You can add as many phone, emails... without loading the page. (This is algo a great work by Nate)
  • The toolbar. This small toolbar really makes you work faster... you'll see...
  • Custtom attributes. As you may have read in Ray's blog (Ray is an amazing guy too), you can define custom attributes without writing a line of code which will be shown in the custom attributes section. (more information in this wiki article: Custom attributes)
  • Extension and configuration easier than ever. 2 groups of properties in portal.properties define all the sections you will see when creating users and when adding users... completely customizable, easy, right? and you can even add your own sections here! All you have to do to display your new section is add its name to the appropiate property and place a jsp file with the same name (changing hyphons for underscores) in the folder enterprise_admin/user/ In this folder you will find a jsp file for every section, so it can't be easier to modify, so, you can even place custom attributes (using the taglib) in the section you prefere. (more information about this can be found in this wiki article: User Administration)

All the things said before are the same for organizations. You will aso find 2 groups of porperties and you will be able to add your jsp files for new sections in enterprise_admin/organization folder. (more information in this wiki article: Organization administration). From the organization administration you can even change the logo which will be displayed in all the pages of your organization.

I hope you enjoy all these new features, and please, feel free to tell us what you think, we are completely open to new ideas, feedback and suggestions!

Blogs
Nice post Julio!

One other thing to highlight is that the user administration is also much more powerful by default. For example, as one of your screenshots shows you can now add regular roles, community roles and organizations roles directly from the user profile. You can also make the user member of communities or organizations directly from the profile.

In summary almost everything you can do with a user you can do it from it's redesigned profile.
Hi,
is there any chance to change the unique identifier to uid instead of email.
I configured LR5.2 with openSSO which works fine - except if you have two users with the same email address.
Thanks
Gerhard
Hi Gerhard,

you can choose that your users log in using user ID instead of email address, but several fields such as screen name, email address or user ID must be unique for each user.
Julio, thanks for that quick answere - I had changed the login already to use screen name
but as said - I have several users with the same email address in our LDAP server which is connected with our OpenSSO - so I would need liferay to accept that email is not unique...
Hola!
Es posible eliminar usuarios desde la administración de LR 5.2? Es que sólo da las opciones de desactivarlos, pero luego no puedes reutilizar esas direcciones de correo....

Gracias!
Julio,

thank you for a very informative posting.

I plan to move to the Liferay platform and have several related questions:

- I have an existing table of users and would like to import them to the user_ table, something like the Import function (opposite to the existing Export function). Can I use some Liferay APIs to do this? One of the functions I'd need is the "encrypt password" call)

- I was looking for the javadoc file with the APIs but could not spot it. Can you point me in the right direction?

Thank you so much for your help,

Jeff