Liferay Portal 3.2 Released: CMS + Clustered Cache

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News: Liferay Portal 3.2 Released: CMS + Clustered Cache

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  1. Liferay Portal 3.2 Released: CMS + Clustered Cache (18 messages)

    • Posted by: Brian Chan
    • Posted on: January 31 2005 11:52 EST
    Liferay Portal 3.2 has been released.

    Summary of the major new features include CMS based on the popular Journal portlet. The Liferay web site was rebuilt to showcase the idea of Articles, Structurs, and Templates, giving the integrated CMS a very flexible XML/XSLT engine. Will be JSR 170 compliant.

    The backend was rearchitected to take advantage of OSCache's recent release which includes for JGroups. This makes Liferay even more scalable because you can add nodes to your Liferay deployment and not lose caching.

    Many more bug fixes and improvements.

    To see a demo of the portal, check out http://demo.liferay.net

    To see the output of the CMS, see http://www.liferay.com

    To see the content of how the CMS can be manipulated, download any of the Liferay distributions. More documentation will be posted on the Liferay web site in the coming days.

    Enjoy! And thanks for everyone's contributions.
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    Threaded Messages (18)

  2. impressive portlets, but it's not easy to add custom portlets[ Go to top ]

    Liferay is impressive, in particular all the portlets that come with it.

    The most common criticism is that it is not flexible. It can be difficult to integrate custom portlets into the portal.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  3. Integrating Custom Portlets[ Go to top ]

    It's easy to deploy custom portlets now.

    For example:

    http://www.liferay.com/cms/servlet/DOCUMENTATION-DEVELOPMENT-HOT-DEPLOY

    This link shows you how to deploy our test.war and even the Sun war. The instructions allow you to hot deploy your custom JSR 168 portlets.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  4. Simple Layout but Powerful Portlets[ Go to top ]

    Hi,

    Yes it's hard to extend Liferay but it's not impossible.

    But overall, the perfect PortalEngine (for me) would be :

    1. Liferay Portlets and Engine (very stable)
    2. Jetspeed's LayoutFeatures (nested Portlets, different controllers, ...)
    3. A snip-snap like wiki and CMS implementation.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  5. How Do You Get The Custom Portlet To Show On Liferay[ Go to top ]

    I have used the instructions at http://www.liferay.com/cms/servlet/DOCUMENTATION-DEVELOPMENT-HOT-DEPLOY to hot deploy the test.war but the instructions does not tell you how to configure the custom portlets to show on liferay portal. How do you get the portlets to show? Do you have to update the following files liferay-display.xml, liferay-portlet.xml, portlet.xml?
    Reply to this Reply to original

  6. How Do You Get The Custom Portlet To Show On Liferay[ Go to top ]

    but the instructions does not tell you how to configure the custom portlets to show on liferay portal. How do you get the portlets to show? Do you have to update the following files liferay-display.xml, liferay-portlet.xml, portlet.xml?

    You answered your own question. portlet.xml is standard jsr-168 format.

    liferay-display.xml example:


    <display>
    <category name="category.tools">
    <portlet id="iseriessysstat_portlet" status="dev" />
    <portlet id="5250_portlet" status="dev" />
    </category>
    </display>


    liferay-portlet.xml example:



    <portlets>
    <portlet id="iseriessysstat_portlet" struts-path="iseriessysstat_portlet" />
    <portlet id="5250_portlet" struts-path="5250_portlet" />
    </portlets>
    Reply to this Reply to original

  7. impressive portlets, but it's not easy to add custom portlets[ Go to top ]

    The most common criticism is that it is not flexible. It can be difficult to integrate custom portlets into the portal.

    I've built some JSR 168 portlets (one is a 5250 emulator and another is an iSeries monitor) and they are very easy to develop and deploy. No harder than developing a standard war based app...
    Reply to this Reply to original

  8. I built a liferay portal[ Go to top ]

    About a year ago I downloaded Liferay and built a simple portlet. I had not even seen JSR 168 and in a few days I had configured the portal and built the portlet. I've been running the instance for about 9 months. It went down once. ANyway, I have been very happy with it, though at the time I would have liked a better tutorial on how to write the portlet (since I also did not know JSP and had to learn that too).
    Reply to this Reply to original

  9. Eager to see CMS documentation[ Go to top ]

    I think every open source portal/CMS is a bit too "portal" or too "CMS". Your new cms is impressive (even if pages seem to be a little slower than the portal demo ones - I'm sure you will fix it soon) and, if it is integrated as I hope it could fulfill the lack of a portal framework able to serve both nice designed content pages *and* portlet enabled functionalities.

    Will it be possible mixing up content and portlets easily?
    Reply to this Reply to original

  10. Eager to see CMS documentation[ Go to top ]

    Right now, the CMS aspect is meant to serve web sites that are not portal looking at all, for the external world. It's completely flexible as it's based on XML/XSLT.

    In the next phase, the internal portal will be modifiable to use the XML/XSLT from the CMS to change the look and feel.

    So you have best of both worlds, depending on your needs: a complete non portal looking CMS based web site, with role based content management, and a very boxy portal look that is good for extranets/intranets and traditional portal usage.

    The documentation for CMS is coming, for now though, the easiest way to learn is to go through the Journal portlet, and play around with the relationship between Articles/Structures/ and Templates.

    In a way, Structures are like the skeleton/XML piece.

    Templates are the XSL piece.

    And Articles is a way for marketing folk to go in there and change text without bothering IT folk.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  11. CMS Structure[ Go to top ]

    Hi,

    is there any documentation about how the navigation of the cms Website can be changed ?

    Stefan
    Reply to this Reply to original

  12. CMS Structure[ Go to top ]

    Look under templates, and look for LAYOUT-MENU-DATA

    We use XML/XSL strictly, so you can just trace it that way.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  13. Eager to see CMS documentation[ Go to top ]

    There's a fairly basic CMS tutorial available at:
    http://www.liferay.com/cms/servlet/DOCUMENTATION-USER-GUIDE-CMS
    Reply to this Reply to original

  14. Liferay Portal 3.2 Released: CMS + Clustered Cache[ Go to top ]

    Congrats. It seems you've read my mind with clustering. I have several questions, though:

    From the site: "You can cluster the enterprise release of Liferay in multiple tiers: presentation tier, business logic tier, and database tier to meet your specific load requirements."

    1.) Only the Enterprise version benefits from clustering ?
    2.) You say it works with Struts/Tiles. Wouldn't be possible to integrate OS Sitemesh as well, and have a way to choose between Tiles and sitemesh? In my oppinion Sitemesh beats the crap out of Tiles.

    thanks in advance
    Reply to this Reply to original

  15. Liferay Portal 3.2 Released: CMS + Clustered Cache[ Go to top ]

    You can cluster the professional version as well, but not in 3 tiers. That would be 2 tiers, because the spring beans and the servlet are on one container, the db in another.

    For the enterprise, you can break up the ejb in one layer, the servlet in another layer, and the db in another layer.

    How is Tiles inferior to Sitemesh? I'm not too familiar with Sitemesh.

    Your custom portlets can use sitemesh if you want, but the portal framework itself is built on top of Struts and Tiles.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  16. Liferay Portal 3.2 Released: CMS + Clustered Cache[ Go to top ]

    You can cluster the professional version as well, but not in 3 tiers. That would be 2 tiers, because the spring beans and the servlet are on one container, the db in another.
    For the enterprise, you can break up the ejb in one layer, the servlet in another layer, and the db in another layer.
    got it
    How is Tiles inferior to Sitemesh? I'm not too familiar with Sitemesh.
    Now, I wouldn't say tiles is inferior :-) I would say just that sitemesh rocks harder :-). Tiles looks too much like jsp includes, you include too much. Sitemesh is an implemetation of the decorator pattern, easy to use, alot more flexible and elegant than tiles. You can aggregate content from different NON java sources, hell you can easily build a portal look like website with it. It just missing the portlet lifecycle/states :-). Take a look at it, you can't be a web developer w/o taking a look at sitemesh :-).
    Your custom portlets can use sitemesh if you want, but the portal framework itself is built on top of Struts and Tiles.
    Allright, I understand what you mean, I'll look into that, thanks.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  17. Liferay Portal 3.2 Released: CMS + Clustered Cache[ Go to top ]

    Looks great!

    I'm planning on making my Cocoon (2.1.5) Web application to be JSR-168 and WRSP compliant, is Liferay worth a look for this?

    Thanks
    Reply to this Reply to original

  18. Liferay Portal 3.2 Released: CMS + Clustered Cache[ Go to top ]

    Yup, it may meet your requirements. What are you looking to do in Cocoon?
    Reply to this Reply to original

  19. Cocoon?[ Go to top ]

    Hi Brian,

    Cocoon is the Web interface tier, "all" pages are created with XML/XSLT. The business engine is based on J2EE with Entity beans serving the Cocoon tier. We have DTOs passing through tiers for this, it really wotks great for complex business rules. Also, Cocoon provides us with the elegent ability to integrate content fronm other sources. I really like the pipeline framework for its extensible possiblilities.

    Now, want to be Portal standards compliant, however don't want to add another framework just for JSR-168 and WSRP.
    Reply to this Reply to original