Using the Control Panel

In this chapter, we continue our coverage of Liferay’s control panel that we began in chapter 15. We’ll cover the following topics:

• Portal settings including mail host names, email notifications, identification, and display settings

• Custom fields

• Monitoring

• Plugins configuration

• Server administration, including resources, log levels, properties, captcha data migration, file uploads, mail, external services, scripts, and shutdown settings

• Portal instances

Let’s begin with mail host names.

Mail Host Names

Mail Host Names appears after Authentication and Users on the Portal Settings page of the control panel. You can enter other mail host names (one per line) besides the one you configured on the General tab. This lets the portal know which mail host names are owned by your organization.

Email Notifications

There are five tabs under the Email Notifications page of Portal Settings. The Sender tab allows you to set the portal’s administrative name and email address. By default, these are Joe Bloggs and test@liferay.com. You can change them to whatever you want. This name and email address will appear in the From field in all email messages sent by the portal.

Figure 16.1: Automated Emails: Account Created Notification

The other four tabs are Account Created Notification, Email Verification Notification, Password Changed Notification and Password Reset Notification. These tabs allow you to customize the email messages that are sent to users each time any of those four events occur.

Figure 16.2: Definition of Terms for Automated Emails

A list of tokens, entitled “Definition of Terms,” is provided so you can insert certain values (such as the portal URL or the user ID) when you are setting up the custom email messages.

Identification

The identification section has several links for addresses, phone numbers and other information you can configure in your portal. This allows you to set up contact information for the organization that owns the portal. Developers can query for this information in their applications.

Miscellaneous: Display Settings

This section allows you to set the default portal language and the time zone. You can also set up a portal-wide logo which appears in the top left corners of portal pages.

Figure 16.3: Server Configuration Miscellaneous Display Settings

Liferay’s default theme is configured to display the portal logo. For custom themes, you can choose whether or not to display the logo. Be careful to choose an image file that fits the space. If you pick something too big, it might overlap with the navigation. Next, let’s look at how to customize different types of portal assets using custom fields.