Building a Site with Liferay's WCM

You've just been assigned the task to build the web site for a small company that makes video games named Spartan Software. You've decided to take advantage of Liferay Portal and its rapid deployment features as well as its ability to get a fully functional, content-rich web site up and running in little time.

We'll walk through the creation of Spartan Software's web site, starting by creating some simple content using Liferay's built-in WYSIWYG editor and then publishing it. We'll then take advantage of Liferay's robust structure editor. We'll use templates to display the content and the explore some of the advanced publishing features such as the built-in workflow and Asset Publisher.

Simple Content Creation

As we've stated above, content is the reason web sites exist. Liferay Portal has made it easier than ever to get content published to your site. Because Liferay Portal is so flexible, you can use basic authoring tools right away or take advantage of the more advanced features. It's adaptable to your needs.

We'll begin by creating simple content using Liferay's WYSIWYG Editor and then we'll publish it to the home page of Spartan Software's web site. This a fast and straightforward process that demonstrates how easy it is to create and publish content onto your Liferay Portal. So let's get familiar with the Web Content section of the Control Panel so we can create and publish our first pieces of content.

Web Content Section of the Control Panel

Illustration 45: Choosing an organization or community in the Content sectionWhen you manage web content from the control panel, you have the ability to select the location where you will be adding or editing the content. For instance, you can add content that will be available to a specific community, organization, or globally across the portal. The Content section of the Control Panel displays the name of the community or organization where you are currently working as its heading. You can change where you're working using the drop down attached to the heading.

We will add our first piece of content to the Spartan Internet community, which we defined earlier in the chapter as the default community.

Rich, WYSIWYG Editing

Once you have the Spartan Internet community selected, click on the Web Content link in the control panel. Next, click the Add Web Content button. This is a highly customizable form that is asking for a title and it contains a powerful WYSIWYG editor. From here we can add images and links, change fonts, italicize, increase font size and more. We will cover the other features such as structures, templates, and content scheduling later in this chapter.

For now, type the words Welcome to Spartan in the Name field. Notice that content can be localized in whatever language you want. If you click the localize check box, two select boxes appear which allow you to pick the language you're working in and the language that is the default. You can enter translations of your content for any language in the list. The screenshot below shows this interface but for now, we won't be using it, so you can leave it unchecked. In the content field, add a short sentence announcing that the web site is up and running.

Illustration 46: Web Content Editor

Images, Fonts, Links, and More

Getting a new web site up and running is an exciting step for any enterprise, whether it is a large corporation or a small non-profit charity. To celebrate this momentous achievement at Spartan Software, let's give our announcement some of the pomp and circumstance we think it deserves!

Using the editor, select all of the current text, and then change the style to Heading 1, the font size to 20, and the color to medium blue.

A couple of lines lower, return the style, font, and color to normal or default. Type in another sentence. As you can see, you can adjust the style, size, and color to match the needs of the content. You can also bullets, numbering, links to another site, or custom images. You can even add an emoticon. Let's add a smiley face at the end of our announcement.

Illustration 47: Customizing Content

The WYSIWYG editor is a flexible tool that gives you the ability to add text, images, tables, links, and more. Additionally, you can modify the display to match the purpose of the content. Plus it's integrated with the rest of Liferay Portal: for example, when you upload an image to be added to a page, that image can be viewed and manipulated in the Image Gallery portlet.

If you're HTML savvy, Liferay CMS doesn't leave you out in the cold. You can click the Source button and write your own HTML if you wish.

Assigning Permissions

You can determine who will and who won't see your content. By default, the content is viewable by Anyone (Guest Role). You can limit viewable permissions by selecting any Role from the drop-down or in the list. Additionally, Liferay Portal provides the ability to customize permissions in more detail. Select the More Options link next to the drop down button, and you'll find the different activities you can grant or deny to your web content.

Illustration 48: Permissions for Web Content

For this piece of web content, we don't need to change anything. After you're finished with permissions, click Save. This will save the content in draft form. Once you're satisfied with the your changes, select Publish. This makes the content available for display, but we still have some work to do to enable users to see it. In Liferay CMS, all content resides in a container, which is one of two portlets: Web Content Display or Web Content List. By far the most frequently used is the Web Content Display portlet. So let's go back to the page where we want the content displayed and add the Web Content Display portlet (in this case, the Welcome page).

Publishing Content with the Web Content Display Portlet

Now that we've created and published our first piece of web content for Spartan Software, it's time to display it. First, we'll need to add the Web Content Display portlet to our Welcome page. Do this by selecting Add → Web Content Display from the Dockbar.

Illustration 49: Adding the Web Content Display Portlet

Once the portlet appears, drag it to the position on the page where you want your content to appear. You can use the Web Content Display portlet to lay out the content on your pages any way you like. You can have as many Web Content Display portlets on a page as you need.

Publishing Existing Content

To add existing web content, select the gear icon on the lower left of the portlet. You will see the message "Please select a web content from the list below." You have several options here.

Naturally, if your content appears in the list, you can simply select it. If there were lots of published content available, you could search for the content by name, ID, type, version, content, and community (click the Advanced link to see all the options). You can also show the available locales for your content. If you're working on the page for a particular language, you can select the translation of your content that goes with your locale.

Illustration 50: Publishing web content is a snap. At a minimum, you only have to select the content you wish to publish. You can also enable lots of optional features to let your users interact with your content.

If you have enabled OpenOffice.org integration with your portal, you can also enable the document conversion. This gives your users the ability to download your content in their format of choice. This is especially handy if you are running a research or academically oriented site; users can very quickly download PDFs of your content for their research projects.

Note that you also have other options, such as enabling a Print button, enabling ratings so that users can rate the content, enabling comments, and enabling ratings on comments.

The Print button pops the content up in a separate browser window that contains just the content, without any of the web site navigation. This is handy for printing the content. Enabling ratings shows one of two ratings interfaces Liferay has: five stars or thumbs up and thumbs down. This can be set globally in the portal-ext.properties file. See Chapter 6 for further information about this.

Enabling comments creates a discussion forum attached to your content which users can use to discuss your content. Enabling ratings on comments gives your users the ability to rate the comments. You may decide you want one, some, or none of these features, which is why they're all implemented as simple check boxes to be enabled or disabled at need.

If you click the Supported Clients tab, you'll see that you can choose the type of client to which you want to expose content. This lets you target the large screens of users' computers for expansive graphics and lots of special effects, as well as target the small screens of mobile devices with pertinent information and a lightweight page. For now, leave both checked and click the Save button. You can now close the configuration window.

Publishing New Content

To publish new content, select the page and green plus icon on the lower left of the portlet. This launches the same full-featured editor you've already seen in the Control Panel, which lets you add and edit content in place as you are working on your page. This is another example of the flexibility that Liferay Portal offers. At times, you may want to add content directly into the Web Content Display portlet of the page you're managing, especially if you are in the process of building the page. At other times, you may want to use the control panel to create content, because at that moment you're more concerned with the creation of the content and not where the content will later be displayed. Either way, Liferay CMS supports both processes equally.

Editing Content

Once the content is displayed—whether you've selected content or created it in the Web Content Display portlet—you can edit the content directly from the Web Content Display portlet or from the Control Panel. To edit it from the Web Content Display portlet, select the pencil icon to the lower left of the portlet. This will launch the WYSIWYG editor and from there you can make any necessary changes.

Illustration 51: Web Content Display Portlet

When you publish your content this way, it will become immediately available on the site (unless, of course, you have a workflow enabled, which we'll see below). It's nice to be able to edit the content where it is when you need to, as well as edit it in the Control Panel.

One thing to note here that's important: if you want to view your page the way your users will see it (i.e., without all those portlet controls and icons), you can go up to the Dockbar and select Toggle Edit Controls. This makes all those extra controls you see as a portal administrator disappear. If you need to use those controls again, just select Toggle Edit Controls again.

Advanced Content Creation

You will find that as your web site grows, managing it becomes more challenging. Without preset limitations, users can display content in any order and in any manner they desire (think huge, flashing letters in a font nobody can read). Also, without a scheduling feature, manually removing or replacing old content becomes cumbersome. Furthermore, without a workflow for approving content, some content might get published that should not have been, or content could get published that contains errors or omissions.

Thankfully, with Liferay Portal's Advanced Content Creation features, managing a complex and rapidly evolving web site is easy. You can use Structures to define which fields are available to users when they create content and use Templates to define how to display that content. Additionally, you can configure Liferay's built-in Workflow system to set up a review and publishing process and then take advantage of the Scheduling feature to determine when content is displayed and when it's removed. Liferay Portal gives you the management tools you need to run everything from a simple, one-page web site to an enormous, content-rich site.

Structures

Structures are the foundation for web content. They determine which fields are available to users as they create a new item for display. Structures not only improve manageability for you the administrator, but also make it much easier for the users to quickly add content.

For example, say you're managing an online news magazine. All of your articles need to contain the same types of information: a title, a subtitle, an author, and one or more pages of text and images that comprise the body of the article. If Liferay only supported simple content as has been described above, you would have no way to make sure that your users entered a title, subtitle, and author. You might also get articles that don't match the look and feel of your site. If titles are supposed to be navy blue and they come in from your writers as light blue, you need to spend time reformatting them before they are published.

Structures give you the ability to provide a format for your content so that your users know what needs to be entered to have a complete article. Using structures, you can provide for your users a form which spells out exactly what is required, and which can be automatically formatted properly using a template.

To create a structure, you simply add form controls such as text fields, text boxes, text areas (HTML), check boxes, select boxes, and multi-selection lists, as well as specialized, Liferay-specific Application Fields such as Image Gallery and Document Library right onto the structure. Furthermore, you can move the elements around by dragging them where you want them. This allows you to quickly brainstorm different orders for your input fields. Additionally, elements can be grouped together into blocks which can then be repeatable. Template writers can then write a template which loops through these blocks and presents your content in innovative ways, such as in sliding navigation bars, content which scrolls with the user, and more.

Let's take a look at how we edit a structure.

Editing a Structure

Go back to the Control Panel and the Web Content section. Click Add Web Content to add another piece of content to your portal. Instead of going right for the content this time, however, we're going to create a structure. To edit a structure, simply select the Edit button from the Structures tab.

Illustration 52: Structure Editor

It is very easy to edit structures: all you have to do is drag elements into the structure and then give them names. For instance, select the Checkbox element under the Form Controls tab and drag it onto the structure. You can do the same with any of the elements. To remove it from the structure, simply select the Delete icon (black circle with X) in the upper right corner of the element. Take a moment to add, delete, and rearrange different elements.

Illustration 53: Structure Elements

Liferay supports the following elements in structures:

FORM FIELDS

Text Field: Used for items such a titles and headings.

Text Box: Used for the body of your content or long descriptions.

Text Area (HTML): An area that uses a WYSIWYG editor to enhance the content.

Checkbox: Allows you to add a checkbox onto your structure. Template developers can use this as a display rule.

Selectbox: Allows you to add a select box onto your structure.

Multi-selection Lists: Allows you to add a multi-selection list onto your structure.

APPLICATION FIELDS

Image Gallery: Allows you to add the Image Gallery application into your structure.

Upload Image: Allows you to add the upload image application into your structure.

Document Library: Allows you to add the Document Library application to your structure.

MISCELLANEOUS

Link to Page: Inserts a link to another page in the same community.

Selection Break: Inserts a break in the content.

Illustration 54: Editing Options for ElementsEditing Elements

When creating a new structure it is essential that you set the variable names for the elements for the template writers. Otherwise, the generated variable names will be very difficult for a template writer to follow. For Spartan Software, we want to create a series of guides that give a step-by-step list of instructions for the game level designers. In your structure, you can add the element Text Area (HTML) which has the Field Label Instructions. However, we want to give it the variable name of Steps. This can be done very easily: at the bottom of every form element is a Variable Name field. Replace the generated name with the name you want to use. There are many other options for fields, including setting tooltips for users. To set these options, select the Edit Options button in the lower right corner of the element.

The Instructions for the User field is where you can type in instructions for the user and even display it as a tooltip. For the Spartan Software Company News structure, type in something that will help users know what to put into the Body element (example: this is an HTML Text area for the body of your content). Also, enable the Display as Tooltip box. Now, when users hover over the Help icon near your title, they will see the instructions you entered.

Assigning Permissions

Permissions to the structure are straightforward. Generally, you don't want most users editing structures as this often requires a developer to modify the template assigned to the structure. However, you do want to make your structure viewable to everyone that will be using it to add web content. You can determine who views a structure by selecting from the Viewable By select box beneath the Permissions tab. By default the Anyone (Guest Role) is selected.

Illustration 55: View Permissions for Structure

You will also want to determine how users can interact with the structure. You can do this by selecting the More link.

Illustration 56: More Permissions for Structures

From the More link, you have the ability to grant or deny permissions based on Roles. For instance, you can give the Guest role the ability to Add Discussion or you may want to give a Community Member the ability to Delete. Liferay Portal makes it easy to configure the permissions based on your specific needs for the site.

Templates

Developers create templates to display the elements of the structure in the markup that they want. Content can then be styled properly using CSS, because markup is generated consistently when users enter content. In essence, templates are scripts that tell Liferay how to display the content within the fields determined by the structure. Any changes to the structure require corresponding changes to the template. Otherwise, new or deleted fields will produce errors on the page. Without a template, the portal has no idea how to display content which has been created using a custom structure.

Template Types (VM, XSL, FTL, and CSS)

Liferay supports templates written in four different templating languages. This is so that you can get started right away. If you have experience with one over another, you can use whichever one you've already used before. If you are just starting with any one of them, we recommend Velocity, as it is less "chatty" than XSL and extremely simple to understand.

VM (Velocity Macro): Velocity is a scripting language that lets you mix logic with HTML. This is similar to other scripting languages, such as PHP, that you may have seen before, though Velocity is much simpler. It's been in the product the longest, so it is probably the most widely used language for templates in Liferay CMS. If you haven't used any of the template languages before, we recommend using Velocity: you'll get up to speed the fastest.

XSL (Extensible Style Sheet Language): XSL is used in Liferay templates to transform the underlying XML of a structure into markup suitable for the browser. While it may not be as clean and compact as Velocity or FTL, it is widely used for transforming XML into other formats.

FTL (FreeMarker Template Language): Freemarker is a templating language which could be considered a successor to Velocity, though it is not yet as popular. It has some advantages over Velocity for which it sacrifices some simplicity, yet it is still easy to use and less "chatty" than XSL.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): You can use CSS if your structure is very straightforward and modifications are simple (colors, fonts, layouts, etc). If your structure is more complex, however, you'll need to use one of the other options.

Adding a Template

Liferay CMS makes it easy to create structures, templates, and content from the same interface. Let's go through the entire flow of how we'd create a structure, link it to a template, and then create content based on what we've defined. We'll use Velocity for our template, and we'll lay out the structure fields systematically to go along with the format we've defined for our content.

Illustration 57: Adding Template Interface

• Go back to the Web Content section of the Control Panel and click Add Web Content.

• Select Edit from the Structure tab.

• Remove the Content field and add the following fields:

Variable Name

Field Type

Title

Text

Abstract

Text Box

Image

Image Gallery

Body

Text Area

• Select Save.

• After you have saved the structure, select the Templates tab.

• Select Add Template.

• Type in a name and description and enable the Autogenerate ID box.

• De-select the box labeled Cacheable.

• Select VM as the language.

• If you've written the script beforehand, you can select Browse to upload it from your machine. Otherwise, you can click Launch Editor to type the script directly into the small editor window that appears.

• Select Save.

• Return to the Web Content tab and open the Company News content. You'll see the new element labeled Abstract just below the Title.

Below is the template script for this structure. It is written in Velocity:

#set ($renderUrlMax = $request.get("render-url-maximized"))
#set ($namespace = $request.get("portlet-namespace"))
#set($readmore = $request.get("parameters").get("read_more"))
<h1>$title.getData()</h1>
#if ($readmore)
        <p>$abstract.getData()</p>
        <p>$body.getData()</p>
#else
        <p>
        <img src="${image.getData()}" border="0" align="right">
        $abstract.getData()</p>
        <a href="${renderUrlMax}&${namespace}read_more=true">Read More</a>
#end

This template is pretty small, but it actually does quite a bit. First, a portlet URL which maximizes the portlet is created. Once this is done, we get the namespace of the portlet. This is important because we don't want our URL to collide with another URL that might be on the page.

After this, we attempt to get a request parameter called read_more. Whether or not we were successful in getting this parameter is the key to the rest of the script:

• If we were successful in getting the read_more parameter, we display the abstract and the body below the title (which is always displayed).

• If we were not successful in getting the read_more parameter, we display the image, the abstract, and the link we created above, which sets the read_more parameter.

When this template is rendered, it looks something like this:

Illustration 58: By default, the content displays like this. If the user clicks the Read More link, the portlet will display the body field as well. Note we've also enabled comments and ratings in this Web Content Display portlet.

Of course, there is much, much more you can do with structures and templates. Check out the Liferay Wiki (http://wiki.liferay.com) for further information and examples.

Assigning Template Permission

Permissions for templates are very similar to permissions for structures. Generally, you only want specific developers accessing the template. However, you may want to make the templates viewable to some content creators who understand the template scripting language, but are not directly writing the scripts. You can determine who views the template by selecting from the Viewable By select box beneath the Permissions tab. By default the Anyone (Guest Role) is selected.

Illustration 59: View Permissions for Templates

You'll also want to determine how users can interact with the template. You can do this by selecting the More link.

Illustration 60: More Permissions for Templates

From the More link, you have the ability to grant or deny permissions based on Roles. For instance, you may create a role with the ability to update the template and create a second role that can both update and delete. Liferay Portal makes it possible to assign permissions based on the roles and responsibilities within your organization.

Advanced Publishing Options

As we discussed above, as your site becomes larger and more complex, management of the content becomes more challenging. We've discussed Liferay management tools that help you create content quickly and in an orderly fashion. We created a simple announcement and then covered Liferay's new structure editor that allows you to quickly design a structure and prepare it for the template designers. Then, we went through applying a template to the structure. We demonstrated how to display our content using the Web Content Display portlet. Now, we're ready to take advantage of Liferay's advanced publishing options.

If a web site isn't properly managed, it can quickly become out of date, and that drives viewers away. If people are finding your site because of search engines, you don't want them presented with outdated (and now inaccurate) web content.

Additionally, you may want the ability to create content and send it through a review and approve process weeks before you want it displayed on the web site. Liferay gives you this flexibility with the Schedule feature in the Web Content portlet.

Scheduling Web Content

You can publish your content on a schedule. You can determine when the content will be displayed, expired, and/or reviewed. This is an excellent to way to keep your site current and free from outdated (and perhaps incorrect) information. The scheduler is built right into the form that your users make use of to add web content, in the same column as the structure and template selectors.

Illustration 61: Schedule for Publishing Content

Display Date: Allows you to determine (within a minute) when content will be displayed.

Expiration Date: Allows to set the date when the content will expire. The default is one year.

Never Auto Expire: Allows you set your content to never expire.

Review Date: Allows you to set a date when you want the content reviewed.

Never Review: Allows you to determine that your content will not be reviewed.

As you can see, the scheduling feature in Liferay Portal gives you great control in managing when, and for how long, your web content is displayed on your web site. Additionally, you have the ability to determine when your content should be reviewed for accuracy and/or relevance. This makes it possible to manage your growing inventory of content.

Tags and Categories

Though tags and categories will be more fully described in Chapter 5, it is important to mention them here. Tags are keywords that can be attached to web content in order to help users find content. Categories are a hierarchical organization of content whose structure can be defined by administrators. With tags and categories, you can make it easier for your users to find your content through search or navigation.

Why Tag?

Tags are keywords attached to a piece of web content in the portal. By assigning a tag to web content, you define metadata about that content. This can be used by Liferay's search engine to score the results of a search, enabling users to find content that is most relevant to their search. Tags can be created on the fly by the creator of the content, and it is important to tag your content whenever it is created. If you don't tag your content, all the search engine has to go on is the full text of the content when a user does a search, and that might not produce the most optimal results.

Tagging also helps with navigation. Liferay Portal has two portlets specifically designed for navigating content using tags: Tag Cloud and Tag Navigation. If you add either of these to a page, you can use them to show the topics contained in your content.

Who Tags?

Tags in web content are added by the creator of the content. They can be added on the fly or they can be selected from the existing library of tags. For most of the portal, users tag content, but for web content, only the content creator tags the content, because there is no user interface for regular users to tag web content.

It is important that you both tag and categorize your content when you enter it.

What is the Difference Between a Tag and a Category?

Categories are defined by someone with administrative access to the content. They are hierarchical, tree-like structures that users can use to find content. Categories are different from tags in that they are never created by end users. Instead, categories define how your content is organized from the point of view of the owner of the content. A good example of categories might be the table of contents of a book: it shows the hierarchical structure and organization for all of the content within that book. This shows that the structure of the book has been planned ahead of time by the creator of the book. Categories do the same thing. By contrast, tags are like the index of a book: they show where many different topics are mentioned within the book in alphabetical order. When a search is done throughout the book, even the author might be surprised at how many times he or she mentions a particular topic outside of its category. So both ways of organizing your content are important, especially if your users will be using search to find content.

Tagging and categorizing web content is easy. You can do it at the bottom of the same form you use to add content. If you open the Categorization section of the form, you'll be presented with an interface for adding tags and categories.

Illustration 62: Tagging and categorizing content can be done at the same time you create it. The Control Panel contains an interface for managing tags and categories for each community or organization in the portal. This interface can be used administratively to manage your tags and categories. We'll take a look at this interface in the next chapter.

Using Liferay's Integrated Workflow with Content Management

Workflow is essentially a predetermined sequence of connected steps. In Liferay CMS, workflow is designed to manage the creation, modification, and publication of web content. You can set up a workflow so that content cannot be published without going through an approval process that you design. In this way, content goes up on your site only after it has been reviewed and approved.

Liferay's workflow engine is called Kaleo workflow, and it ships with Liferay CE. If you have uninstalled it or are using EE, it needs to be installed and configured separately, and this is covered in Chapter 7. For now, we'll assume it's installed and show you how you can take advantage of workflow in getting your content through any approval steps between creation and publication.

To enable workflow for Web Content, navigate to the Control Panel and select Workflow Configuration. From there, select a workflow that has been deployed to Liferay.

Illustration 63: Enabling Workflow for Content Management

As you will discover in Chapter 7, you can design workflows to suit your organization's approval process. For Spartan Software's implementation we will use the Single Approver workflow which ships with the product.

Defining Workflows for Web Content

Let's go ahead and set up Liferay's Workflow for the Spartan Software web site.

• Go to the Control Panel and select Workflow Configuration from the left panel.

• From the select box, choose Single Approver for Web Content. Click Save. Note that you can add workflow to many of Liferay's portlets.

That's all it takes to set up workflow for web content. Now publishing content works a little bit differently. Let's go through the process of publishing some sales goals for a new Spartan Software game. Return to the home page and click on the Add Web Content icon on the Web Content Display portlet. Call it Sales Goals and enter some content. Notice that the Publish button is now gone. In its place is a Submit for Publication button. Go ahead and click it.

Illustration 64: Pending Workflow

Next, go to the Workflow Tasks in Control Panel and then select My Workflow Tasks. You will see the option to Review Content for Sales Goals. It shows because you are logged in as an Administrator. There is also a Content Approvers role which is defined by this workflow, and anyone in this role can approve content as well.

To approve the content, you must first take ownership of it. Click on the task. You should see the screen below.

• Illustration 65: My workflow tasks shows tasks that are assigned to your role. To take up a task, you must assign it to yourself first.

Taking ownership of, reviewing, and approving content is very easy:

• Click the Assign to Me button. Alternatively, you could assign it to someone else in the Content Approvers role or create / update a due date for the content's approval.

• Once you've assigned it to yourself, buttons allowing you to approve or reject the content appear. Click Approve.

• You're asked to submit a comment. You'd have to do this for either Approve or Reject. Add a comment and click Save.

• The content is now approved.

In a real world situation, you obviously wouldn't want the person who created the content to be the one who approves it. Instead, you would have one or more roles designed for users who will be creating content, and you will have specific users assigned to one or more roles for approving content. Our example was of a very straightforward workflow, as it has only a single approver. Kaleo workflow allows you to design workflows that go through as many steps as you need to conform to your business processes. This is beyond the scope of this chapter, but is covered in Chapter 7.

Using the Asset Publisher Portlet

As we create web content, it's important to keep in mind that to Liferay, the pieces of content are assets, just like message board entries and blog posts. This allows you to publish your web content using Liferay's Asset Publisher.

You can use the Asset Publisher to publish a mixed group of various kinds of assets such as images, documents, blogs, and of course, web content. This helps in creating a more dynamic web site: you can place user-created wiki entries, blog posts, or message board messages in context with your content. Let's take a look at some of its features.

Querying for Content

The Asset Publisher portlet is a highly configurable application that lets you query for mixed types of content on the fly. By giving you the ability to control what and how content is displayed from one location, the Asset Publisher helps you to "bubble up" the most relevant content to your users.

To get to all of the portlet's options, click the Configuration link in the portlet's menu (the wrench icon).

Selecting Assets

The ability to configure how content is displayed and selected by your users further demonstrates the flexibility of the Asset Publisher. You get to choose how content is displayed. You can select it manually for display in a similar way to the Web Content Display portlet, or you can set up predefined queries and filters and let the portal select the content for you, based on its type or its tags and categories.

Let's first take a look at how we might select content manually. You'll see that it's very similar to the Web Content Display portlet.

Selecting Assets Manually

By selecting Manual from the select box beneath Asset Selection, tell the Asset Publisher that you want to select your content manually. You can select what you want to be published within the portlet, or you can create new content right from within the Asset Publisher.

Illustration 66: Selecting assets manually is very similar to the Web Content Display portlet, except you have many other content types from which to choose.

Clicking Add New gives you a menu of options, enabling you to create the content right where you are. You can create blogs, bookmarks, calendar entries, documents, images, and of course, web content. Anything you create here will be added to the list below of assets that will be displayed by the portlet.

Clicking Select Existing gives you a similar menu, except this time you can pick from existing content in the portal that either you or your users have created. Has someone written an excellent wiki page that you want to highlight? Select it here, and it will be displayed.

The Asset Publisher gives you the ability to mix and match different content types in the same interface. Once you have your content selected, you can move on to the display types to configure how the content appears.

Most of the time, however, you'll likely be using the Asset Publisher to select content dynamically.

Selecting Assets Dynamically

The default behavior for the Asset Publisher is to select assets dynamically according to rules that you give it. These rules can be stacked on top of each other so that they compliment each other to create a nice, refined query for your content. You have the following options for creating these rules:

Scope: Choose the communities or organizations from which the content should be selected.

Asset Type: Choose whether you will display any asset or only assets of a specific type, such as only web content, only wiki entries, or any combinations of multiple types.

Illustration 67: You can filter by tags and categories, and you can set up as many filter rules as you need.

Filter Rules: Add as many filters on tags or categories as you like. You can choose whether the content contains or does not contain any or all categories or tags that you enter.

Once you've set up your filter rules for dynamically selecting your content, you can then decide how the content will be displayed.

Ordering and Grouping

You can display the content returned by the filters above in order by title, create date, modified date, view count, and more in ascending or descending order. For instance, you may have a series of "How To" articles that you want displayed in descending order based on whether the article was tagged with the hammer tag. Or, you may want a series of video captures to display in ascending order based on a category called birds. You can also group by Asset Type or Vocabularies. Vocabularies are groups of categories defined by administrators in the Categories section of the Control Panel. Again, we'll see more about categories in Chapter 5.

Illustration 68: Ordering and Grouping

In the Ordering and Grouping section of the Asset Publisher, you have great control over how content is ordered and grouped in the list, but this is only one aspect of how your content will be displayed. You can refine the display through many other display settings.

Display Settings

The Display Settings section gives you precise control over the display of your assets. There are a multitude of options available to configure how you want your content to appear. You can configure the style, length of abstracts, behavior of the asset link, maximum items to display, pagination type, and file conversions. Additionally, you can enable printing, flags, ratings, comments, and comment ratings, and these work the same way they do in the Web Content Display portlet.

Illustration 69: Display Settings

DISPLAY STYLE

Abstracts: Shows the first 200-500 characters of the content, defined by the Abstract Length field.

Table: Displays the content in an HTML table which can be styled by a theme developer.

Title List: The content's title as defined by the user who entered it.

Full Content: The entire content of the entry.

OTHER SETTINGS

Asset Link Behavior: When the link to the asset is clicked, it can be displayed in the Asset Publisher or in the portlet to which the asset belongs, such as the Blogs or Message Boards.

Maximum Items to Display: You can display 1-100 items.

Pagination Type: Select Simple or Regular. Simple shows previous and next navigation; regular includes a way of selecting the page to which you'd like to navigate.

Exclude Assets with 0 Views: If an asset has not been viewed, exclude it from the list.

Show Available Locales: Since content can be localized, you can have different versions of it based on locale. This will show the locales available, enabling the user to view the content in the language of his or her choice.

Enable Conversion To: If you have enabled Liferay Portal's OpenOffice.org integration, you can allow your users to convert the content to one of several formats, including PDF.

Below these options are the same ones in the Web Content Display portlet: enable print, enable comments, enable ratings, etc.

Show Metadata: Allows you to select from the available metadata types (see below).

Illustration 70: Show Metadata

Enable RSS Subscription: This gives users the ability to subscribe to the content via RSS Feeds.

The Display Settings section of the Asset Publisher has numerous options to help you configure how your content selections are displayed to your users. Even though there are many choices, its easy to go through the options and quickly adjust the ones that apply to you. You'll want to use the Asset Publisher to query for mixed assets in the portal that have relevant information for your users.