Overview #

Starting with version 4.3 of the Liferay Portal, the software has been released with a plugin architecture that allows for developers to quickly produce themes, portlets, and layouts that can be redistributed into different environments. In order to facilitate their use, Liferay also introduced a Plugin Installer portlet.

Downloading Plugins #

There are two ways to obtain .WAR files

1) Download the .WAR from the Plugin Installer Portlet by clicking the download link.

2) Download from files from Source Forge [http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group id=49260&package id=243192.

GUI: Plugin Installer #

Open up Plugin Installer and located the Plugin that you want to install.

]

Click Install.

That was easy!

Manual Install #

If you cannot use the Plugin Portlet (because your Liferay installation is behind a firewall or has no access to the Internet), you can install a plugin

manually by copying it to your hot deploy directory.

Locating Your Hot Deploy Folder #

By default, this directory is located in your user directory, which is different for each operating system

 Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>  
 Windows Vista: C:\Users\<user name>  
 Linux: /home/<user name> 
 Mac OS X: /Users/<user name>  

Hot Deploy #

First - start up Liferay Tomcat.

Second - copy plugin into the hot deploy directory in <user directory>/liferay/deploy.

Third - watch the Liferay console. When you see the message "copied successfully," the plugin has been deployed.