Revamped User Guide is now Online

One of the things we've been working on over the past few months is a complete reorganization of Using Liferay Portal, the documentation for our flagship product, Liferay Portal.

For the 6.1 release cycle, we decided to rename the book (it used to be called the Liferay Portal Administrator's Guide) so that it would better reflect its content. For several releases, the "Admin Guide" (as we'd call it for short) had been more than a guide for Liferay administrators: it also contained a growing library of end user documentation on Liferay Portal's functionality. So for 6.1, we renamed it so that its title would match what was actually inside the book.

After a month or two, though, we realized that this was not enough. To truly be a complete user's guide, the book's content needed to be reorganized. Working with Liferay's Product Management and Engineering groups, we spent a couple of months moving, reorganizing, changing, and wordsmithing the text. To do this, we first created an outline of what our "ideal" user's guide would look like. We then moved our existing content around to match the outline. Finally, we went through all the text and smoothed everything out.

The result is what you see on Liferay's documentation page. But we aren't done yet.

When re-outlining the content for the book, we realized that some features were missing. Our next task, then, is to fill those gaps. Once we've done that, we'll be ready to publish the book in other formats, such as print, PDF, and EPUB.

I want to thank all of those who worked so hard on this reorganization: Jesse Rao, Mark Healy, and Jim Hinkey, as well as Ed Chung and Jorge Ferrer for their guidance. Though we're all Liferay employees, I hope you know that community members are welcome to participate. Not everybody is a developer. If you love Liferay and you like to write, you are more than welcome to help us. Head on over to github.com/liferay/liferay-docs to grab the source files for our documentation. Here are some gaps that we need to fill:

  • Chapter 10: need content for workflow in applications such as WCM, Docs & Media, and collaboration.
  • Chapter 12: we need to cover some of the smaller applications, such as Bookmarks, Shopping, and Weather.
  • Chapter 15: needs real world examples of using Liferay's security model, as well as best practices.


I hope you enjoy the new book. I know it's not perfect, so any comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome. Thanks for reading!

Blogs
Many Thanks. I miss always Info about Exporting/Importing of site templates etc. In 6.1 Excpetions will be thrown when I load a stie template as a lar. However it takes some hours to configure such a template in the control panel. ...
Hi Morad,

You'll find the documentation on exporting and importing site templates here:

http://www.liferay.com/documentation/liferay-portal/6.1/user-guide/-/ai/lp-6-1-ugen12-page-templates-0

Hope this helps!

--Rich
Really a great job!
Great Job, Rich and Team.

This looks like a very comprehensive guide than the earlier version.

One suggestion is when you come up with the PDF version of this guide, i don't think you have to really replicate the text inside "portal.properties". If the reader wants to go thru the contents of this file, he/she can go through it online, instead of going to many pages of this new guide.
Richard,
The section on upgrading to 6.1 used to be all in a single place, and was quite easy to follow, as I recall. It now seems to have been dispersed. Given that a number of people have had, and are having, problems with this upgrade, would it be possible to post the old description somewhere?