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Front-end handover

Joe Gallant,修改在6 年前。

Front-end handover

New Member 帖子: 2 加入日期: 17-10-26 最近的帖子
Hello,

I am a freelancer and about to take on the front-end build for a client who has developed their platform with Liferay. I have never developed in Liferay before and am a complete beginner to it.

I am wondering if anybody has any experience in just providing the front-end for a Liferay project and what the client would want me to provide? I will eventually get a full brief off of them but want to roughly know what it will entail.

Do you think its best to provide them with a Liferay theme ready to go using .jsp? Or would it best to build the front-end completely seperate from Liferay in HTML and let them integrate it as a Liferay theme?

If anyone has any previous experience in doing this before I would really appreciate your thoughts and how you dealt with the handover.

Thank you very much,
Joe
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Andrew Jardine,修改在6 年前。

RE: Front-end handover

Liferay Legend 帖子: 2416 加入日期: 10-12-22 最近的帖子
Hey Joe,

I was torn whether or not to answer your post. To be honest, for me anyway, this is not an easy question to answer. First and foremost, I would like to say welcome. Second, learning Liferay is not always an easy task and if you are starting with 7 the curve can be a little sharper so -- bet get that helmet out emoticon.

I am a freelancer and about to take on the front-end build for a client who has developed their platform with Liferay. I have never developed in Liferay before and am a complete beginner to it.


We've all been there. At this stage I would say you need to make sure that you bring one virtue to the table. Patience. Like anything new, you need to prepare yourself for the roller coaster of emotions that come with learning something new, especially when you have a breadth of experience with other technologies and tools that you will be constantly comparing Liferay to. I went through it, briefly though because I fell in love with the product pretty quickly. With that said, I have worked with many clients who, at every step of the way, fought tooth and nail to try to get around the product and suffered an immense frustration. Deep breaths and acceptance that there is more than one way to solve any problem -- that will make the whole experience less frustrating (I think). And that is not restricted to Liferay of course.

I am wondering if anybody has any experience in just providing the front-end for a Liferay project and what the client would want me to provide? I will eventually get a full brief off of them but want to roughly know what it will entail.

Do you think its best to provide them with a Liferay theme ready to go using .jsp? Or would it best to build the front-end completely seperate from Liferay in HTML and let them integrate it as a Liferay theme?


OK, here is where the rubber hits the road in your question. I have worked both ways. I have worked with clients where the front end dev provided a "flat" html version of the product, and with teams where the front end guy worked directly in the theme(s) and plugins. To answer this question, I would say it also depends on the team. If you client as a strong Liferay Frontend guy who is good with themes and UI stuff, then you can probably do the flat site approach. But if you client had that guy? I am guessing they would not have reached out to you emoticon.

At the end of the day, I will always advocate for the latter -- working directly in the theme and plugins. The principle reason for this would be that you don't end up duplicating your efforts. The portal itself has a pile of markup and styles that come with it out of the box. The work you do, the styles you create at times will align with what Liferay is providing for you, but most of the time you would have to make adjustments and overrides. Liferay 7 has a whole new suite of tools that are supposed to help you build UIs faster and with more consistency as well so by working directly with the product you might even accelerate your delivery. Building a flat site in a bubble and ignoring what is there as boilerplate (and features like Lexicon) will likely mean that when you go to integrate your work into the plugins that are to be deployed into Liferay, things will not look as you expect. Your 1.5em padding in your flat site, might not take into account the 0.5em that is already there, that sort of a thing. I know that the couple of times that I took a flat site and then converted it into a theme, I can say that most of the effort ended up in revisiting the CSS and JS to try to get it all working the way we needed it to.

So to answer your question more directly --

1. Liferay is a great product, but you need to learn the ropes and that can take some time depending on dedication, experience and how fast you learn of course
2. Work directly in the plugins (themes, portlets, web content templates, application display templates, etc)
3. Don't try to go against the grain. Use Liferay's own source and study it to understand how the out of the box features use the code

... and while you are waiting for your client to get you some specs? I would be sure to check out the dev guide and start playing around with some stuff locally. I personally think that the community support is a great tool at your disposal, so just as you have reached out to ask about this, as you are on your Liferay journey, post and ask questions.
Joe Gallant,修改在6 年前。

RE: Front-end handover

New Member 帖子: 2 加入日期: 17-10-26 最近的帖子
Hi Andrew,

Thanks for your response, very helpful!

I think I am going to go ahead and develop it as a Liferay theme. Just have a couple more questions if thats okay.

1) Will I need a full Liferay license to develop a theme?
2) Do I have full control over the front-end libraries? So do I have to load in AlloyUI and jQuery etc or can I use what I want?
3) Do you think it's possible to develop a Liferay theme using MAMP instead of using the Liferay IDE?

Appreciate the help!!

Thanks,
Joe
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Andrew Jardine,修改在6 年前。

RE: Front-end handover

Liferay Legend 帖子: 2416 加入日期: 10-12-22 最近的帖子
Hey Joe,

Thanks for your response, very helpful!


Happy to help, no worries.

1) Will I need a full Liferay license to develop a theme?


Nope. There are a few things that are only available in the licensed version of the product, but, to my knowledge, the theming stuff is not among it. You can use the community edition of Liferay to do all your theme stuff.

2) Do I have full control over the front-end libraries? So do I have to load in AlloyUI and jQuery etc or can I use what I want?


You do -- and I should add that AlloyUI is on it's way out I believe (though I have no insight into timing or anything). I still use it because I like it emoticon .. but you certainly don't have to. You can load whatever JS you want into the theme. Just be aware that the portal/portlet lifecycle doesn't always lend itself to easily use some of these fancy shmancy new UI frameworks. But if you are just looking to use BS3 stuff with JQuery for fancy animations and such, you can do that.

3) Do you think it's possible to develop a Liferay theme using MAMP instead of using the Liferay IDE?


Yeah, you can't use MAMP brotha. For starters the P in MAMP stands for *puke*PHP*puke*. You should use the tomcat bundle -- it's the easiest way to go. You also don't HAVE to use MySQL for a database, you can probably get away with the Hypersonic for your development (it's bundled) because you are just working on the pretty stuff anyway. I haven't taken a poll, but I would guess that the majority of front end devs doing theming in Liferay are just working with sublime and the command line for deploy. In fact, in 7 you can using gulp and the watch task so that you can stick with the front end tools that you are familiar with: https://dev.liferay.com/develop/tutorials/-/knowledge_base/7-0/themes-generator

Let me know if there is anything else.
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Jack Bakker,修改在6 年前。

RE: Front-end handover

Liferay Master 帖子: 978 加入日期: 10-1-3 最近的帖子
Joe Gallant:

Do you think its best to provide them with a Liferay theme ready to go using .jsp? Or would it best to build the front-end completely seperate from Liferay in HTML and let them integrate it as a Liferay theme?

1) Capabilities of Liferay and 2) capabilities of developers/designers lead to the front-end result. wrt #2: knowing how to build a Liferay theme is necessary to guide front-end designers. wrt #1: taking advantage of what Liferay can make available in a theme can provide many useful features and save oodles of $ in development.