Hello Everyone,

Our project requirement is to have the two versions of same out of box portlet (e.g Calendar). One version would be the default out of box calendar portlet and other version would be the customized out of box calendar portlet. We are planning to develop the customized calender portlet in the SDK plug in environment

My questions are:

1) Is it a good idea to develop the customized portlet in the SDk plug in environment?
2) What would be the impact on this portlet in SDK Plug when migrating from one liferay version to another.
3) Would these portlets -one from out-of-box portlet & one from plugin environment run on same liferay instance?

Thanks and Regards,

Shivansh Sharma

So if I'm understanding correctly, you want to keep the "out of box" calendar portlet "as is" and create a new portlet that extends or customizes the calendar portlet?

Usually, if you want to customize an existing portlet, you'd use the "ext environment" to make your changes. But you also want to keep the original portlet as well. The SDK Plug-in is used to create new portlets. Depending on what you are doing, you could use the SDK environment to make a new calendar portlet. It'd be deployed just as if you were creating a brand new portlet, ie it could be deployed on teh same instance. It'd just be a brand new portlet. Depending on what you are doing and what changes you are making, this may be appropriate. For instance, if you wanted to reskin or change the behavior of the calendar portlet, you could use the LifeRay client jars to access the various methods that the calendar uses and provide your own JSPs (for skinning/UI behavior changes).

I haven't developed in the EXT environment yet, but you could also probably use that, make the changes you want to make on the calendar portlet, but since you also want to keep the "out of box" portlet as well, you'd need to define it as a new portlet (in the portlet.xml file) and have it point to your new Portlet class. it really just depends on what kind of changes you are talking about.

To answer your specific questions:



I think it depends on what kind of changes you are doing. When you develop in the SDK environment, you are really creating a new portlet, but you can also leverage many of the services that LifeRay uses with the various LifeRay client jars.



If you are developing on the SDK Plug-in, you are in essence creating new portlets which should be portable from one version to another. You'd just redeploy and should be good to go.



Since with the SDK environment, you are creating new portlets, they can reside on the same liferay instance. Its just as if you were developing a JSR-168 portlet, you can deploy on the same instance.

I'd also recommend looking into the ext-environment which you use to extend LifeRay source code/customize it. For instance, if you wanted to change the Login JSP page, you would use the EXT environment to do that. It all depends on what kind of changes you are making. Plus, you want to keep the original, out-of-box portlet, so you don't want to replace it, but create an alternate version of a portlet.

For overriding of JSPs, I'd recommend using Hook Plugins rather than using the Ext Environment.

http://www.liferay.com/web/rauge/blog/-/blogs/portal-hook-plugins