Web Content Management

With most products, you would read the previous chapter, understand what the software can do in terms of setting up your environment and security model, and go ahead and build your system. You'd design your infrastructure and get your server environment up and running while your developers would go ahead and write the applications that would live on your web site. Liferay Portal, however, doesn't leave you to start that far behind. 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 (CMS). We call it the key application because it is the one that most everybody uses, because everyone needs to load content onto their web sites. Liferay's CMS empowers you to manage all of the content on your site quickly, easily, and in the browser. Beyond managing existing content, Liferay CMS lets users easily create and manage everything from a simple article of text and images to full functional web sites. Web publishing works alongside Liferay Portal's larger collection of applications, which means that you can add in shopping cart functionality, visitor polls, web forms, community 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 CMS, including:

• Page types

• Layouts

• Page and content permissions

• Importing and exporting content

• Content creation and editing

• Staging

• Content publishing

• Structures and templates

• CMS Workflow

• Asset publisher

By the time we're done, you should be able to apply all of these concepts to your own content. To demonstrate all of Liferay's Content Management features, we'll create and manage content on the portal for a fictitious company called Spartan Software.

First, a little housekeeping. If we're going to be Spartan Software, our portal should also be called Spartan Software. To set the general information about your portal like the name and mail domain, go to Control Panel → Portal → Settings. The configuration for Spartan Software might look something like the below screenshot.

Illustration 33: 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're ready to begin creating pages.