Managing Pages in Liferay Portal

With most products, you would learn what the software can do in terms of setting up your users and security model, and then start building your system. You'd design your infrastructure and get your server environment up and running while your developers write the applications that live on your web site. With Liferay Portal, however, you start farther ahead. Liferay Portal is more than just a container for applications with a robust security model. It already includes many of the applications you'll need, out of the box, ready to go, and integrated with all the user management and security features you've already learned about.

Perhaps the key application that ships with Liferay is Liferay's Web Content Management system (WCM). We call it the key application because it's the one that almost everybody uses, all web sites have content. Liferay's WCM empowers you to manage all the content on your site quickly, easily, and in the browser. Beyond managing existing content, Liferay WCM lets users easily create and manage everything from a simple article containing text and images to fully functional web sites. Web publishing works alongside Liferay Portal's larger collection of applications, which means that you can add shopping cart functionality, visitor polls, web forms, site collaboration tools, and more. Everything is done with our collection of easy-to-use tools with familiar rich-text editors and intuitive interface.

This chapter covers all aspects of Liferay WCM, including:

• Page types
• Layouts
• Page and content permissions
• Importing and exporting content
• Content creation and editing
• Staging
• Content publishing
• Structures and templates
• WCM Workflow
• Asset publisher

By the time we're done, you should be able to apply all these concepts to your own content. To demonstrate Liferay's Content Management features, we'll create and manage content on the portal for Nose-ster, a new social network where people are connected based on what their noses look like.

First, a little housekeeping. If we're going to be Nose-ster, our portal should also be called Nose-ster. To set general information about your portal like the name and mail domain, go to the control panel and select Portal Settings under the Portal heading. You could set up the configuration for Nose-ster as follows.

Figure 2.1 Changing Portal Settings

You can also customize the logo in the top left corner of every page by selecting Display Settings under the Miscellaneous tab on the panel to the right. Once you've made the changes, we can begin creating pages.