Content Management System Using Liferay Portal

A standout amongst the most widely recognized employments of Liferay Portal is as a content management system. Indeed, numerous use Liferay Portal just for content management, if it be web content management or management of file-based content (documents, media files, and the like). They do this on the grounds that Liferay Portal's content management system is so effective and emphasize rich that it could be offered as a completely divide, standalone arrangement of its own. Obviously, the way that its mixed with whatever remains of the applications in Liferay Portal makes everything the more engaging.

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Keeping track of documents, images, video, and more

So what would it be able to do? We'll answer that question, however take it in two parts. To start with, we'll take a gander at Liferay Portal's part as a web content management system, and after that we'll perceive how Liferay Portal excels at file-based content management.

Adequately building a site with Liferay WCM 

The foremost thing you'll need to comprehend about Liferay WCM is that it scales to work for the most diminutive of sites the distance up to the biggest of sites. Case in point, on the little end of things you can inflame Liferay Portal, drop the Web Content Display application onto a page, and quickly begin writing content into a, WYSIWYG editor, in place. On the vast scale of things, you can set up Liferay Portal to have numerous distinctive sites for numerous diverse purposes, all with their own domain names. Every site can exploit a divide organizing server, where content and pages are made by groups of individuals utilizing structures and templates, and updates to the production server are published on a schedule, only after having gone through a multi-step approval process.

That is effective. 

Naturally, Liferay Portal begins with a single site that has a single page. You can raise any site you wish out of this, finish with multi-nested page hierarchies, as the figure below show

Figure 1.1: Liferay's page hierarchies are not difficult to make, utilizing a tree structure that is well known to any individual who has utilized an file manager.

These pages can have any layout you like: Liferay Portal ships with some implicit, and you can make your own particular custom layouts and send them effortlessly. Pages might be included, removed, or reordered whenever, and you have the full adaptability of all the Html page properties, for example, meta tags and robot file declarations, that you require. 

Pages are likewise mixed with Liferay's powerful permissions system, so its not difficult to confine access to certain parts of your site. You can give distinctive clients destinations of their own, with public pages that have their content and blog, and private pages that hold their calendar and email.

In the event that you're running an web site where you'll be making and overseeing loads of diverse sub-locales for people and gatherings, you can exploit page models and site patterns. The previous empowers you to set up models of pages with predefined layouts and provisions as of recently on them, and the recent empowers you to make an entire site made up of different, predefined pages.

There's significantly more. Provided that you have an extremely huge site, you may require different individuals to finish up it. Also you absolutely don't need the live site changing after your clients' eyes. Consequently, Liferay Portal furnishes a characteristic called staging, that gives you a chance to place your progressions in a holding range while they're being chipped away at. You can have a server, where the organized webpage lives on the same server as the live website, or you can have a remote remote staging server, where all web content work happens on a differentiate server from your live site. In either case, when you're ready, site progressions might be pushed to the live site, either physically or on a schedule.

Figure 1.2: Staging supports publishing manually or on a schedule.

Liferay Portal’s web content creation tools are easy and intuitive to use at all levels. If you need only basic content management capabilities for your site, you can jump right in. From the Dockbar, you can add the Web Content Display application anywhere in your page layout and enter content in place. It’s easy to go from this basic level of content management to more sophisticated levels of functionality.

For example, suppose you wanted to build an online news-oriented site. Most of the content you’ll publish is an article of some kind. Liferay’s web content management system lets you create a structure for this, so that you can capture all the information from your writers that you’d need in an article. The figure below shows what this structure might look like to a journalist who’d be entering his or her article into the system.

Figure 1.3: Structures allow you to specify exactly the type of data that makes up your content. You can also include tooltips to help your users understand what each field is for.

As you can see, you can use structures to make sure writers provide the title of the story, what type of story it will be, and the byline (i.e., the writer’s name). You’ve made sure that all the relevant information for the story is captured in the system.

Web content is one example of what in Liferay is called an asset. Assets can have meta-data attached to them, and that metadata can be used to aggregate similar assets together in searches or as published content. One way to do this in the example above is that writers can tag and categorize their stories so they can be found more easily by users.

This is just one example, of course. But the concept is applicable to any kind of site you’d want to build. For example, if you were building a site for a zoo, you could use web content structures to help users enter data about animals in the zoo, such as their common names, their scientific names, their species, their locations in the wild, and more.

When it comes time to publish content, structures are combined with templates. Templates are instructions for how to display structures, written most of the time in Velocity or Freemarker–both of which are well-known templating languages used for mixing HTML with programmatic elements. Because of this, they’re very easy to write, and can help you ensure that your site has a consistent look and feel.

There is much more to web content. You can create abstracts, schedule when content is published and when it should be taken down (or reviewed), define related assets, and more.

This is just the web content portion of Liferay’s content management system. Liferay Portal is also great at managing file-based content.

It’s rare to find in an open source project a full-featured content management system. Most of the time, you’ll find web content management systems and file-based content management systems as separate projects. Liferay Portal, however, provides you with both. As shown above, the web content management system is as robust as any other you’ll find, and its file-based content management system is the same.

Liferay Portal keeps the UI of its file-based content management system in an application called Documents and Media Library. This application resides in the control panel or can be added to any page, and, as shown below, looks very much like the file manager that you’re already familiar with from your operating system.

Figure 1.4: Liferay Portal’s Documents and Media library was purposefully designed to be familiar to anyone who uses a computer.

Like a file manager, you can browse files and folders in nested hierarchies. You can also mount other repositories that you might have in your environment, such as Documentum (EE only) or any system that implements Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS). It provides previews of just about every document type you can think of. And, like a file manager, you can copy and move files between folders by dragging and dropping them. Of course, if you still want to use your operating system’s file manager, you can, because Liferay’s Documents and Media library supports WebDAV, using the same credentials you use to log in to Liferay.

Liferay Portal’s Documents and Media library, however, is much more robust than a file manager is, because it’s a full content management system. You can define ways of classifying files that may be of different types, but are meant for the same, overarching purpose.

For example, you can define metadata sets, which are groups of fields describing attributes of a file. One of these that ships with the product is called meeting metadata, and it contains fields such as Meeting Name, Date, Time, Location, Description, and Participants. This is a generic set of fields that go together and that you’d want to use as a group. You can create as many of these as you want.

For files, you can define document types. They provide a more natural way of working with files. For example, you might create a document type called Meeting Minutes, because this is how we as humans conceptualize our documents. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s a Microsoft Word document, an HTML file, or a text file–the document contains meeting minutes. Once you’ve created the document type, you can attach the Meeting Metadata set that contains many of the fields you’d want, and you can also add extra fields, such as a field for action items. When users want to add a file containing their notes for meeting minutes, they can also add all the relevant metadata about the meeting (such as the time, location, and action items). This captures the context information that goes with the document, and it provides a much more natural way of working with documents than just dumping them into a shared file system.

Of course, the system goes much further than this. Folders can be set so that only certain document types can be added to them. Workflow rules can also be added to folders to run files through an approval process that you define. In short, Liferay’s file-based content management system gives you all the features you need to manage and share files in a group.

Many Liferay Portal users see it as a robust content management system, and they use it primarily for that purpose. Now, hopefully, you can see why. We’ll cover the system in-depth in the body of this book, but for now we need to look at some of the other ways you can use Liferay Portal, starting with its fantastic collaborative tools.

Ray Business Technologies Pvt Ltd, www.raybiztech.com , is a global Information Technology (IT) Services and Solutions company. Raybiztech offers comprehensive end-to-end IT Services for Business Application Development & Maintenance, Enterprise Solutions, Testing & Quality Assurance, Embedded Systems, Cloud Computing and IT Infrastructure Management to organizations in the Banking & Financial Services, Insurance & Healthcare, Life Sciences, Manufacturing, Retail, Distribution & Logistics, Media & Entertainment, Leisure & Travel, Communication, Energy & Utilities, Federal Government verticals and Independent Software Vendors. Raybiztech's innovative IT Solutions in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Enterprise Portals and Content Management (EPCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Enterprise Mobility including Product Development and Life-Cycle Support, have resulted in significant strategic and cost advantage for their clients worldwide.

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