Ext plugins

Ext plugins provide the most powerful method of extending Liferay. This comes with some tradeoffs in complexity, and so Ext plugins are designed to be used only in special scenarios in which all other plugin types cannot meet the needs of the project.

Before deciding to use an Ext plugin it's important to understand the costs of using such a powerful tool. The main one is the cost in terms of maintenance. Because Ext plugins allow using internal APIs or even overwriting files provided in the Liferay core, it's necessary to review all the changes done when updating to a new version of Liferay (even if it's a maintenance version or a service pack). Also, unlike the other types of plugins, Ext plugins require the server to be restarted after deployment, as well as requiring additional steps when deploying or redeploying to production systems.

The main use cases in which an Ext plugin may be needed are:

• Customizing portal.properties that are not supported by Hook Plugins

• Customizing Struts Actions

• Providing custom implementations for any of the Liferay beans declared in Liferay's Spring files (use service wrappers from a hook instead if possible)

• Adding JSPs that are referenced from portal properties that can only be changed from an ext plugin (be sure to check if the property can be modified from a hook plugin before doing this)

• Direct overwriting of a class (not recommended unless it's strictly necessary)