Day 1
This one-day course provides students with a deep dive into the use of themes to customize the look and feel of the Liferay Portal. The course starts off with an introduction to Liferay, explaining what Liferay Portal is, what it does, and what makes Liferay Portal an ideal choice for running your web site. You will also learn how users and content are organized in the portal and how Themes can chance the look and feel of your portal and enhance your user's experience.With the basic building blocks in place, you'll move on the Liferay Plugins Software Development Kit (SDK) and how it can be used to create and customize Themes for the Liferay Portal. You will also take a closer look at how Theme projects are created and organized.
After this quick introduction, you will configure your development environment. Throughout the course you'll be using the Liferay Developer Studio to create and deploy your theme. With your development environment in place, you'll move on to creating your first Liferay Theme.
This first theme project will be used to illustrate the page styling elements such as the header, background, footer and dockbar as well as the styling associated with each portlet. Additional topics such as Color Schemes will also be explored. Once your theme has been created, you'll learn how to teat your theme and finally package your theme for distribution.
With this first Theme under your belt, you'll move on to several Advanced Topics. First, you'll take a look at how you can use Velocity in your Themes. You'll start with an introduction to the Velocity language and then learn how you can access Velocity variables in your custom theme. You'll also learn how you can use Velocity to configure and embed portlets into your theme.
After Velocity, you'll move on to a look at the Alloy UI, the user interface web application framework that you can leverage in your Liferay theme. You'll start with an introduction and overview of how Alloy can be used and then move on to an exercise where you'll have the opportunity to combine Alloy and Velocity to make reusable dynamic elements.
At the end of the day, we will wrap up with a review of each of the topics covered and we'll take a look at some best practices and recommendations from Liferay Theme Experts. After completing this course, you'll find that you are ready to begin developing your own custom themes.