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.
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.
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