Liferay

Many of you probably already know how it's possible to preconfigure the personal pages of users by using some properties of the portal.properties file: default.user.private.layout.template.id=2_columns_ii default.user.private.layout.column-1=71_INSTANCE_OY0d,82,23,61 default.user.private.layout.column-2=11,29,8,19 Some versions ago Ray also added the possibility of specifying a...
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Yes, we've finally done it!! Liferay's community wiki has been migrated from MediaWiki to Liferay's own wiki portlet. We are pretty excited about this because it brings a lot of benefits. To name a few: The wiki is now fully integrated in the liferay.com website, so it's easier for community members to navigate through all the sources of information. For example, visitors that are...
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Inter Portlet Communication (IPC) is a hot topic nowadays. This was probably the most missed feature of the first version of the portlet spec (JSR-168), but has made it to the second version (JSR-286, supported since Liferay 5.0). Maybe this is the reason why more and more people are becoming interestind in IPC, and even in portlets in General. As I've mentioned in previous posts, JSR-286...
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A progress bar is one of the most useful widgets for a user interface when the user can perform lengthy tasks. Unfortunately, while it's a widget very often found in desktop applications it's not so common in web applications. The reason for this is that it's not so obvious how to implement them. In fact, not so many years ago I remember saying to a customer that it was not possible to show a...
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Several weeks ago we announced the compatibility of Liferay 5 with the final draft of the spec. and now it's been declared officially final. Thanks go to Stefan, the spec lead, for all his hard work during the last weeks dealing with legal and administrative stuff to make this possible. I recommend you all to download and read the spec , because it has many interesting additions:...
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Until now when the user was in any place of the portal  clicked the "Sign in" link he was shown a default portal login page. Of course it was already possible to create your own customized login page using the available portlets, but the user was not redirected there when clicking the "Sign in" button. After this improvement it is possible to let the portal know that a...
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This is a new feature I've been wanting to blog about for a while. It was inspired by a request from a customer who wanted to be able to store the different configurations of web forms and be able to later reuse them. For example, at some point there could be a form for "Contact Us", another for "Request for detailed information", another for "Inscription for event...
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Up until now the editor area of FCKEditor did not always correctly reflect the look&feel that the contents were going to have when published. The reason was that the theme CSS was not being applied within the editor area. With the help of Nate I've just fixed that so from now on , what you see will really be what you get . But this is just the beginning of a better integration. The...
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We've been waiting for this moment for a long time. I've received this question by email, in person and through the message boards, lots of times... when will the Portlet 2.0 spec be ready?. Finally we have the good news, I just got an email from Stefan Hepper to the JSR-286 expert group mailing list announcing that the Portlet 2.0 specification has been approved (so it's very close to be...
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I just came across a blog post with an example on how to create a drag & drop effect using jQuery UI . Looking at the code it surprises how easy it is. The whole JavaScript is around 17 lines of code, but but only around 9-10 of them are directly related to the drag functionality. But after hearing Paul talk about all the casuistics he was considering when implementing this functionality I...
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As promised, I want to finish the review of the new features of the wiki portlet. This time I'm not going to write much and will let the screenshots speak for themselves: Diff view of changes betweeen versions. Here goes a feature that we've waited for for a long time: Click the button and you get: Nice, right? You have to thank Bruno for it. Subscriptions to changes It's...
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Ok, maybe the title is a bit pretentious but I have to say that I'm really excited with the results. I'm surprised myself with how much we've been able to do in so little time. IMHO after these improvements Liferay Wiki can be compared to the most known wiki products out there (proprietary or Open Source). Not only it's comparable to them in terms of wiki related functionalities but it also...
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Yesterday I received my first book bought at Lulu.com and I have to say that the whole process has been great. The price has been lower than the usual technical books I buy and I've had to wait much less than I usually wait when buying a book in on-line shops. Note that I have no relationship with Lulu.com at all, but I think when people do a good job they deserve being recognized for it. For...
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Happy new year everybody!! It's been a while since my last post and this will be a very short one. All I wanted to do is let everyone interested know that I'm working on improving the wiki again. After the latest changes there is been a renewed interest in Liferay's wiki and a company has agreed to sponsor some further improvements (let's give them a big thank you). After several...
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One of the toughest parts of contributing to Liferay is that we are very strict with the coding and design style. We do this because we believe that keeping a very high level of consistency is what allows the product to keep evolving at maximum speed. Fortunately there are very smart people in the community that have been able to learn this rules just by looking at the code and they keep sending...
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