I am a newbie to liferay and hence this question. Our company has custom-portlets deployed in JBoss portal right now and we are evaluating to move to Liferay portal.
Given that we have all JSR 168 portlets, what is the proper migration strategy to move these portlets to Liferay. Our portlets have been developed using JSF.
Also, I saw a lot of articles on how to administer the liferay portal but did not find any that talks about how to deploy a portlet and make it appear in the home page of the portal by editing config files. Since we deploy using a build, configuring the portal from the front end UI is not the use-case that fits us. Our deployment model would be that we will have a Liferay + Jboss portal instance deployed on a physical server and by way of ANT scripts we overlay our custom-portlets into Liferay. So at the end of that process, when we bring up the liferay portal, the custom portlets should we on the default home page.
In Jboss portal, if I want to display portlets on a particular page, I just define a "default-object.xml" in which I specify the theme and the layout and the different portlet-instances. Then I bundle that file, portlet-xml, portlet-instances.xml and the JSPs etc into a WAR file and drop it into the deploy folder. Is there a similar mechanism in Liferay?
Any pointers will be really helpful.

Hi, I have a similar issue. How to migrate the "*-object.xml" configuration to the Liferay Portal without using the administration console of the portal.

Hi Mach,

When switching from JBoss Portal to Liferay you'll need to rethink the concept of "placing portlets in a page". Liferay's way of doing it is much more dynamic which can be confusing when coming from JBoss, but I'm pretty sure you'll prefer it once you get used to it. Let me try to explain how it works.

When a portlet is deployed in a Liferay server it's made available to the administrator. The administrator must then go to a page and place it there. Liferay supports pages per user, per community and per organization. Each of them can have public and private pages and portlets can be added to them at any time (controlling with permissions who can add which portlets to each pages).

In other words, neither the pages of the portal nor the portlets that are placed on those pages are fixed at deployment time. They must be created through the UI, which causes the configuration to be stored in the database.

There are ways to set up preconfigured pages with its portlets (as well as other configurations, content, etc), like it's done with the 7cogs website that is bundled by default when you first download Liferay. Nevertheless I'd recommend to try to switch the mindset to Liferay's way of doing things before considering that option.