Documentation
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Portal Administrator's Guide
Liferay Administrator's Guide
by Richard L. Sezov, Jr.
Copyright © 2008 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:
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to share—to copy, distribute, and transmit the work
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to remix—to adapt the work
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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).
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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, 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
Liferay Portal is the leading open source portal in the marketplace today. This is seen through having received awards from multiple leading industry publications, as well as its impressive download rate (over 40,000 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.
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. 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 Second 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 5.1. Chapter 4 (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.
Additionally, a new chapter on Portal Administration (Chapter 3) has been written. This chapter goes over portal design, listing the things you might want to consider as you build your web site on Liferay Portal. It also covers Liferay's administrative portlets, leading the reader through Liferay's configuration using the Enterprise Admin and Admin portlets.
Other chapters have been expanded to include additional information. For example, Chapter 6 (Maintaining a Liferay Portal) now covers the upgrade process for Liferay, guiding the reader through the process for upgrading a Liferay installation all the way from version 4.3.0 (the version upon which the last edition of this book was based) to version 5.1.
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.
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 seemed like a big accomplishment at the time, but paled in comparison to the work of actually documenting all of the things we'd decided to include.
The writing and editing process for the first edition took a period of five months of mostly full time work. It would have taken much longer except for the fact that many fantastic contributions came unsolicited from many different people. 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 second edition was put together over the course of two and a half months of intensive work. Special thanks are due to Jorge Ferrer for his care and feeding of the Liferay wiki (http://wiki.liferay.com) as well as for his support of the writing process in general. 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, and Bruno Farache.
I'd also like to thank my daughter Julia for checking in on me from time to time and being satisfied with a "sticker" from my label maker instead of play time with Daddy during the day when I'm working. 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