Some time ago I posted on how you can get started creating portlets with Liferay Maven SDK now I’m going to show how you can add themes to your project. If you need a refresher on how to get started check out this post.

1) Open command prompt or terminal and go to your project directory. Next we are going to create a theme using the Liferay theme template. Run:

Now you have your theme project in sample-theme directory with following structure.

2) Open the theme pom.xml file. From the properties section remove liferay.version and liferay.auto.deploy.dir properties. These properties should be defined in the pom.xml in your project root just as we did with the portlet project.

You should also note that there’s two additional properties liferay.theme.parent and liferay.theme.type. These set the parent theme and the theme template language just like in ant based plugins sdk. The property liferay.theme.parent however allows you to define basically any war artifact as the parent. The syntax is groupId:artifactId:version or you can use the core themes: _unstyled, _styled, classic and control_panel.

3) Now you can add your customizations in src/main/webapp. Just follow the same structure as you would do in _diffs. So your custom.css would go to src/main/webapp/css/custom.css.

4) Once you’ve done your customizations and want to create the war file just run

It will create the war file just like with any maven war type project. Another thing it will do is download and copy your parent theme and then overlay your changes on top of it. It will also create a thumbnail from src/main/webapp/images/screenshot.png just like ant based plugins sdk does. These are accomplished by adding the theme-merge and build-thumbnail goals into the generate-sources phase.

5) Now deploy the theme into your Liferay bundle by running:

Liferay 6.1 EE comes with SAML 2.0 Identity Provider and Service Provider support via SAML plugin. If you are not familiar with SAML check out my Introduction to SAML presentation slides.

In this post we will configure Liferay to be SAML Identity Provider and configure Salesforce to be a Service Provider. After we are done we have a user that can move from Liferay to Salesforce without requiring to authenticate on Salesforce. 

You’ll need following things to complete this by yourself:

* Liferay Portal 6.1 EE GA1 Tomcat bundle
* SAML Portlet WAR
* Salesforce developer account. You can sign-up here for free.

The first thing to do is download and install Liferay. If you need help configuring Liferay refer to Liferay 6.1 User Guide. Once that is done you’ll need to configure the SAML identity provider before deploying the plugin. The IdP needs a private and public key pair for signing SAML messages. It uses Java keystore to store the them. We’ll create the keystore and they key pair using keytool that is part of the JDK. You need to pick a unique entity id for your IdP and a password that is used to protect keystore and the private key. In this example we’ll use liferaysamlidpdemo as the entity id and liferay as the password for both keystore and the key. The keystore is created in LIFERAY_HOME/data/keystore.jks as this is the default location SAML plugin will look for it. You can also configure the location and type of they keystore and will do it here just for reference.

You’ll be asked to provide some information that will be in the certificate with the public key.

Next step is to add SAML configuration to your portal-ext.properties.

Now you can deploy SAML plugin by copying it to LIFERAY_HOME/deploy and starting up tomcat. Wait for the saml-portlet to be deployed and available and then open http://localhost:8080/c/portal/saml/metadata. If you have configured everything correctly you should see the IdP metadata similar to below. I’ve just shortened the data on signature and certificate elements.

Even though the IdP is configured and functioning it’s not very useful because there’s no Service Providers configured. For this example we are going to use Salesforce developer account to demonstrate single sign-on between Liferay and Salesforce. If you haven’t already signed up for Salesforce developer account do it here.

We’ll need to export the certificate from keystore because Salesforce doesn’t know how to read SAML metadata.

Now login to your Salesforce developer account in here. On your dashboard click on Setup. 

Then click on Security Controls > Single Sign-On Settings under Administration Setup.

Then click on Edit.

Here’s the setting you need:

* SAML Enabled.
* SAML Version: 2.0
* Issuer: liferaysamlidpdemo (this is the entity id of the IdP)
* Identity Provider Certificate: liferaysamlidpdemo.crt which you exported earlier.
* Identity Provider Login URL: http://localhost:8080/c/portal/saml/sso
* SAML User ID Type: Select Assetion contains User’s salesforce.com username
* SAML User ID Location: Select User ID is in the NameIdentifier element of the Subject statement
* Identity Provider Logout URL: http://localhost:8080/c/portal/logout (Salesforce does not support SAML Single Logout Profile)

Verify that your setting as correct and then click on Download Metadata. Also note the Entity Id as this will be needed on the IdP side.

Move the downloaded metadata xml to LIFERAY_HOME/data/saml/salesforce-metadata.xml. Now we need to configure the IdP to know about this Service Provider. This is done by telling saml plugin where to find the SAML metadata for Salesforce.

If your Salesforce Entity Id is not https://saml.salesforce.com you’ll also need to add following lines to your portal-ext.properties. Note I’m using https://saml.salesforce.com as the entity id but you would replace it with what ever Salesforce reported it to be.

If you had your tomcat still running just restart it so that the new property value is read. Then login as test@liferay.com / test. Now click on Manage > Site Pages. Click on Add Page. Add following values:

Name: Salesforce
Type: URL
URL:  /c/portal/saml/sso?entityId=https://saml.salesforce.com 

Notice the entityId is the same Entity Id that was shown as entity id on the Salesforce Single Sign-On configuration page.

Go to Control Panel and add a new user with same email address as your Salesforce developer account. Sign out and login with that new account. Now click on the Salesforce page link. If everything was configured correctly you are redirected to Salesforce and you are signed in with your developer account. If you want to be redirected to some other page than they home page you can add a URL parameter RelayState with the page URL you want to be redirected to as the value. For example the URL could look like this /c/portal/saml/sso?entityId=https://saml.salesforce.com&RelayState=/006/o. This would take me to my Opportunities page directly.

Now sign out from Salesforce and you will be taken back to Liferay and logged out from Liferay. Now if you click on the Salesforce page it will take present you with Liferay login page and after login will take you to Salesforce.

As part of Liferay 6.1 release we’ve created a new package that has a convenient  script to install Liferay artifacts to your local repository or to a remote repository. This package is provide for both CE and EE releases but it is more useful for EE users because we don’t release EE versions of the artifacts to Maven Central repository.

You can download the 6.1 GA1 package from here and 6.1 EE users can download it from Customer Portal. Once you have downloaded the zip file unzip it. 

In the root of the package you’ll find build.properties. This file defines the remote repository location, repository id and optional gpg signing key and password. You can override settings in this file similarly to those in plugins sdk by creating a build.USERNAME.properties file and overriding the properties you want. If you are just deploying to you local repository there’s no need to override any settings. 

Before you begin you should make sure you have mvn in your path. For remote deployment you should also increase the available memory for maven otherwise you might get a OutOfMemoryError. For windows you can use following in your cmd prompt or set MAVEN_OPTS environment variable.

For Unix-like systems such as Linux and Mac OS X use

To deploy to your local maven repository you can just run:

To deploy to a remote repository such as Sonatype Nexus you need to set credential required to deploy to the repository in ${USER_HOME}/.m2/settings.xml like this:

Then you need to add the repository id and repository location to your build.USERNAME.properties like this:

Notice that the repository id must match the one in your settings.xml so that correct credentials are picked up. You can also set gpg.keyname and gpg.passphrase if you want the artifacts signed. Check out this blog post on how to generate gpg key and distribute the public key.

Now you can deploy it just by running:

Now you have following Liferay artifacts at your disposal. Their groupId is com.liferay.portal and artifactId is one listed below and version is the Liferay release number such as 6.1.0 for 6.1 GA1 and 6.1.10 for 6.1 EE1.

• portal-client
• portal-impl
• portal-service
• portal-web
• support-tomcat
• util-bridges
• util-java
• util-taglib

I’m glad to announce that we have released Liferay maven artifacts to 6.1 GA1. 

All the artifacts will be pushed into the central repository through http://oss.sonatype.org where they are already available. 

This release includes following artifacts:

- portal-client
- portal-impl
- portal-service
- portal-web
- support-tomcat
- util-bridges
- util-java
- util-taglib

In addition to this we’ve packaged the Liferay artifacts into a convenient zip file called /liferay-portal-maven-6.1.0-ce-ga1-20120106155615760.zip with ant script to allow you to deploy them into your local repository easily. We will be providing this for EE releases as well since EE artifacts will not be available from Central.  

We have also released the Liferay maven plugin and archetypes for all types of Liferay plugins:

- liferay-ext-archetype
- liferay-hook-archetype
- liferay-layouttpl-archetype
- liferay-portlet-archetype
- liferay-servicebuilder-archetype
- liferay-theme-archetype
- liferay-web-archetype

I will post later some instructions on how to use those archetypes. If you’ve used the snapshot version there was one last minute change that requires you to now manually set properties liferay.version and liferay.auto.deploy.dir in your pom.xml.