Portal Administrator's Guide

Richard L. Sezov, Jr.

Liferay Administrator's Guide

by Richard L. Sezov, Jr.

Copyright © 2009 by Liferay, Inc.

ISBN 978-0-615-24733-5

This work is offered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Unported license.

You are free:

• to share—to copy, distribute, and transmit the work

• to remix—to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

• Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.

The full version of this license appears in the appendix of this book, or you may view it online here:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0

Contributors:

Ray Auge, Jian Cao (Steven), Brian Chan, Alice Cheng, Bryan Cheung, Ivan Cheung, Shepherd Ching, Alexander Chow, Bruno Farache, Jorge Ferrer, Mike Han, JR Houn, Scott Lee, Wei Hong Ma (Sai), Charles May, James Min, Alberto Montero, Jerry Niu, Michael Saechang, Li Ji Shan (Dale), Ed Shin, Joseph Shum, Michael Young

Preface

Liferay Portal is the leading open source portal in the marketplace today. It has received awards from multiple leading industry publications, and has animpressive download rate (over 60,000 downloads a month and over a million downloads total). Why is it so popular? Because Liferay Portal has out of the box all of the features you need to run a successful web site, whether that site is a public Internet site, a corporate Intranet, or anything in between.

This book was written with the server administrator in mind. It is a guide for anyone who wants to get a Liferay Portal server up and running, and will guide you step-by-step through the installation and configuration process. Use this book as a handbook to getting your Liferay Portal installation running smoothly, and then keep it by your side as you configure and maintain your Liferay-powered web site.

The information contained herein has been organized in a way that hopefully makes it easy to locate information. We start at the beginning: downloading and configuring the Liferay bundles. From there, we work all the way through the multiple ways of installing Liferay manually on an application server, to portal administration. You'll see how to use Liferay's collaboration suite of portlets to enable your users to work together more efficiently and more easily. From there we go into advanced administration topics and enterprise configuration, including clustering and integrating Liferay with other services. We round things out by showing you how to optimize Liferay's performance, how to manage a Liferay installation, how to back it up, and how to upgrade Liferay if you are moving from a previous version.

What's New in the Third Edition

Certainly, Liferay Portal has not stood still since the last edition was written. This edition has been updated so that it covers Liferay Portal up to version 5.2. Chapter 5 (Advanced Liferay Configuration) has been completely revamped to that it covers all of the new portal properties, and the rest of the book has been exhaustively gone through and updated.

The chapter on Portal Administration (Chapter 3) has been overhauled so that it covers Liferay administration using the new Control Panel. This chapter also goes over portal design, listing the things you might want to consider as you build your web site on Liferay Portal.

For this edition of the book, a new chapter on Liferay's unparalleled collaboration suite of portlets has been provided. This chapter will guide you through enabling your users to collaborate using the robust set of tools that Liferay provides: blogs, calendar, chat, mail, message boards, and wikis.

Other chapters have been expanded to include additional information. For example, Chapter 7 (Maintaining a Liferay Portal) now covers database sharding among other things, and an updated section on upgrading Liferay.

Conventions

Sections are broken up into multiple levels of headings, and these are designed to make it easy to find information.

Tip: This is a tip. Tips are used to indicate a suggestion or a piece of information that affects whatever is being talked about in the surrounding text. They are always accompanied by this gray box and the icon to the left.

Source code and configuration file directives are presented like this.
If source code goes multi-line, the lines will be \
separated by a backslash character like this.

Italics are used to represent links or buttons to be clicked on in a user interface and to indicate a label or a name of a Java class.

Bold is used to describe field labels and portlets.

Page headers denote the chapters, and footers denote the particular section within the chapter.

Publisher Notes

It is our hope that this book will be valuable to you, and that it will be an indispensable resource as you begin to administer a Liferay portal server. If you need any assistance beyond what is covered in this book, Liferay, Inc. offers training, consulting, and support services to fill any need that you might have. Please see http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/services for further information about the services we can provide.

As always, we welcome any feedback. If there is any way you think we could make this book better, please feel free to mention it on our forums. You can also use any of the email addresses on our Contact Us page (http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/about_us/contact_us). We are here to serve you, our users and customers, and to help make your experience using Liferay Portal the best it can be.

Author Notes

The first edition of this book was outlined in a small notebook (paper, not a computer) on a plane flying from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. A couple of months later, it was rehashed electronically in outline form among a small group of Liferay employees until the final list of content was considered complete. This seems like a world away now, as so much has changed, not only with the product, but also with the company, as Liferay has grown so much in the intervening years.

For this third edition, I had a target deadline to meet: the book had to be ready for the release of the 5.2 Enterprise Edition of the product. A lot of hard work went into polishing the material and making it as error-free as possible. Of course, no one is perfect, and so if we find any problems with the material, they will be corrected on the errata page for the book in Liferay's wiki (http://wiki.liferay.com).

I have endeavored to give credit to everyone who made a contribution (it's on the copyright page), but if I missed somebody—which would not be surprising—please let me know so your name is not left out of the next edition! I cannot express enough how wonderful it is to be surrounded by so many talented people who do everything they can to make this product the best it can be—even when a particular task is not their primary job.

The engineering team at Liferay is a fantastic group of people, and my job would be a lot more difficult were it not for their patience with me when I interrupt their work with some (pretty dumb, sometimes) questions. So special thanks are due to Ray Auge, Nate Cavanaugh, Brian Chan, Alex Chow, Bruno Farache, Jorge Ferrer, and Mike Young.

I'd also like to thank my daughter Julia for checking in on me from time to time and bringing some good cheer with her. And of course, I want to thank my wife, Deborah, who continually has to put up with long hours as a computer widow, for her understanding and support. I couldn't do any of this without her.

Rich Sezov

http://www.liferay.com/web/rsezov/blog