I am a hardcore Liferay Portal Developer (among many other things (: ) and in my four years of development experience, I’ve had the “pleasure” of training countless developers on Liferay and I know the difficulties most of them face when they first encounter Liferay. Explaining what a portal is, WCM, Workflow management, Dynamic Data Lists, Document Libraries, etc - which most developers generally have to develop from scratch in their previous projects, is a big challenge as it involves a change in the developers core working perspective. Moving from a pure development environment to a more restricted yet completely customizable portal development is a huge change for a lot of persons who just get started with Liferay. And listing out the features Liferay offers is the first thing we generally do when we introduce them to Liferay.
When I had an opportunity to go through "Instant Liferay Portal 6
Starter (ILPS)", an absolute
Liferay beginner guide written by Sandeep Nair, I was obviously a little skeptical
as to how the author would cover Liferay from a fresher’s perspective in just 54 pages (actually its 38 pages removing all the copyright info). I just
finished going through this book and I have to say I’m satisfied. This book does
not deviate from Liferay. Literally. Many other Liferay books I read previously
do this mistake of explaining how to setup a MySQL/Oracle database, how to
install/setup a server, etcetra – which a developer is already supposed to know
before beginning with Liferay. But ILPS stuck to its aim like a leech and am
glad to say it delivered it effectively.
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| Instant Liferay Portal 6 Starter |
The Instant Liferay Portal 6 Starter assumes
that the reader has a working knowledge of the web development environments. It
does explain how to get started with each and every necessary applications
required to get started with Liferay though. So no major worries there.
Liferay has been in the industry for several years now and
changes keep on hitting the newer versions of Liferay Portal. The Instant
Liferay Portal 6 Starter does a pretty neat job explaining a few of these
newer features such as Startup screens, DB configurations, Teams versus Roles
and Marketplace. These things are generally not documented too well on Official
Liferay website and have to be figured out while working with Liferay. Having
them laid out neatly is a huge advantage.
This is
the overview grabbed of the book from
Packtpub:
- Learn something new in an Instant! A short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results.
- Get acquainted with Liferay’s interface
- Learn the core concepts and terms of Liferay
- Create and manage content and learn to apply workflow to it
- Learn about collaboration and document management features
The Installation & Setup of Liferay is explained concisely.
You have to be really careful not to assume this book to be a list of
Sequential set of steps to be followed to get started in Liferay. This book, as
far as I have observed is a very good coverage of the features and
functionalities offed by Liferay Portal and a list of things that you are
expected to encounter in your fight with Liferay while you are working with it.
Although the sequential process is followed wherever necessary, knowing that
this is NOT a development guidebook before reading it, helps the reader gauge
the book’s significance more easily.
The book covers some of the most important aspects of
Liferay such as Pages, Portlets, Layout Templates, Themes, Users, Sites,
Organizations, User Groups, Roles, Permissions, teams, Page and Site Templates
and Liferay Marketplace. The book doesn’t go too deep into each of this things,
but gives you a good head start while explaining what each feature is, where to
find it and how to work on it. The book has some pretty slick illustrations
that don’t go overboard when explaining what it’s trying to convey. The
illustrations are generally circled to highlight what they are trying to
explain in context.
I cannot say there are any cons in the book as it delivered
on its promise, but I would like to highlight a few things I felt needed additions/improvement.
First – Google
is killing iGoogle on November 1, 2013. Even if it fits the
requirement perfectly, I don’t think it’s such a good idea to use iGoogle as an
example when introducing a portal to the reader when it’s going to out of the
web space in the immediate future. Just as a note, iGoogle ‘portlets’ do not
conform to the JSR 168 or the JSR 286 specifications. They are built on Google’s
proprietary protocols. Same goes with Open Social plugin demonstrating how to
use iGoogle Widgets. If a reader reads this book after November 1, 2013, and
tries to retrace the Open Social plugin steps given in the book, he’ll find
facing a dead end as iGoogle will already be dead then. The author should also
have included the naming convention of the downloaded Liferay files from
Sourceforge which I think is very useful.
For example:
liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2.zip
- 6.1.1 – Version number (x.y.z)
- CE – Community Edition (as opposed to EE – Enterprise Edition)
- GA – General Access
When a user first logs into Liferay, a default site is
created for her/him. The author puts this in the later part of the text when
explaining the concept of Sites. Putting a reference of that part at the
explanation of the first login will help the reader to relate those things. I
would also have liked to see the workflow in action in areas other than Web
Content Management (WCM). The workflow explanation is a little too narrow in
scope for me J.
I really liked the “Top 5 features you need to know” section
and was honestly disappointed a little when that section ended. I was craving
for a little more intro to other important features of Liferay. The book
explores:
- Content management
- Document management
- Collaboration tools
- OpenSocial gadgets
- Dynamic Data Lists
The Dynamic Data Lists are a rarely explained concept but can prove to be a very powerful tool for non-programmers and developers alike. Many developers ignore this and go on to develop custom portlets just get basic data that can be collected through DDLs. The author does a slick job explaining DDLs.
Overall, the book is simple, brief and covers a broad
spectrum of Liferay Administrative features. It is non-sequentially explained.
Very useful for Liferay enthusiasts who are just beginning to look into
Liferay. I’m going to try getting a ‘little’ kid, who is just about to start
his career in Liferay, to read this book. Looks light it’ll save me a lot of
trouble in explaining the feature set of Liferay. In the end, it’s all about
exploring things and I suppose in a kind of way, this book gives the reader a
good kickstart in that direction.
I believe Sandeep Nair (author of this book) had to control
himself a lot while writing this book in order to stay focused on the features
of Liferay and not to deviate too much from his goal. Well, Kudos Sandeep – you
nailed it. Great read on the whole and a great way to revise the features of
Liferay for middleware enthusiasts like me.
You can find the book over here: Instant Liferay Portal 6
Starter
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