Upcoming customization options with Application Display Templates

Application Display Templates have become one of the most popular features in Liferay Portal 6.2. Last year we reviewed how to use this powerful tool to customize some Liferay portlets. Furthermore we explained how developers can apply the same feature to their custom portlets in just a few steps.

The Liferay Community provides a great feedback about how you use Application Display Templates and also about the Liferay portlets where you miss this feature. And of course, we have attended your requests cool

Customizing the Language Portlet

The Language Portlet as you know it

Definitely one of your favorites to join the Application Display Templates family. You can now customize every single detail of this portlet. For example, you can turn it into an icon-menu list like this:

The Language Portlet displayed as an icon-menu thanks to Application Display Templates

 

Your breadcrumb will never look the same

The Breadcrumb Portlet as you know it

The Breadcrumb portlet already included some customization options. But you wanted more, and we’ve given you all yes. With Application Display Templates, there’s no limit to your creativity. See how different your breadcrumb can look with just a very simple template:

The Breadcrumb Portlet with a brand new style thanks to Application Display Templates

Thanks Jose Manuel!

Displaying content on a map? Yes, you can!

We are not only extending the support for Application Display Templates to more portlets, but we are also extending the possibilities that this tool provides to display content in a completely new way.

Just a very cool example of this is the work that our colleagues Sergio, Bruno and Adolfo have done with the content geolocation feature. In a nutshell, you can define your content associated coordinates through a new geolocation input field. Among the number of possibilities that this information brings, you can now display your content on a map with the Asset Publisher portlet and a very simple Application Display Template. For example, you can change from this:

A typical list of content with the Asset Publisher

to this:

Content on a Map with Application Display Templates and Google Maps

Content on a Map with Application Display Templates and OpenStreetMap

And these are just the first of a number of new features that Application Display Templates will include in the next version of Liferay Portal. Remember that you can request new features through our website. Thanks for helping us make Liferay Portal a little better everyday heart!

Blogues
Can ADT be recreated using the resources importer?
I did not find a way to do it with ResourceImporter, but you can do it with an application.startup.event as shown in this example: https://github.com/jamesfalkner/VisitorApp-portlet (look at the com.visitorapp.action.StartupAction class - it creates ADTs from both inline literal strings and resource files from the plugin)
BTW, @eduardo - it would be awesome if Liferay would automatically do this when a handler declares a template path through getTemplatesConfigPath() and the plugin is deployed! Right now this code is never called except at Portal startup time...
@Woodbench You could do it using the resources importer and a lar file containing the ADTs. The sample coverflow-theme (see https://github.com/epgarcia/liferay-plugins/tree/DEVCON2013/themes/coverflow-theme) install an ADT for a custom plugin that way.

@james It'd be a nice feature indeed so I'll propose it. Thanks!
Are .LAR files still locked down to a specific version of Liferay? That would be the downside to including the .lar's inside of resources importer. It's nice to create one plugin that works for both 6.2 CE and EE