There are a number of things we like about Liferay and once you start using Liferay it is easy to see why. Liferay is a leader in the portal space (according to Gartner, not just Zia). It also has a highly flexible user interface and integration platform that makes it easy to use. In fact, we recommend it as a go to technology for Web development and integration.
With so many great things about Liferay, it was hard for me to narrow it down to 5 things for our recentWebinar. In case you missed the “Favorite Things about Liferay” webinar, here are the top five reasons Zia loves Liferay:
1) Open architecture – Liferay is extremely flexible as an environment and can be used with any Java application server and any database that is JDBC compliant. This means that most companies will able to leverage existing technology investments with Liferay. You can use things like Tomcast, JBoss, WebLogic, WebSphere, MySQL, Oracle or SQL Server. You can also use any Java web framework such as Liferay MVC, Spring Portlet MVC, Struts, JSF or GWT. As with any open source product, Liferay customers benefit from being able to ‘see under the hood’ and look at the source code to address problems and report bugs/fixes. This type of open architecture makes Liferay both an excellent social platform (wikis, blogs, etc.) and as an integration platform. On a recent customer engagement, I used Liferay to integrate with an ERP, CRM, EFC layer and multiple web services.
2) Fast Site Creation – For any company that is consistently adding or updating site content, Liferay makes it easy to quickly create and add a web page. Content creators can create new pages with little technical background and with minimal or no IT involvement. This puts the control back in the content creator’s hands and frees up IT resources. From a developer standpoint, it is easy to mock up sites for new projects and manage overall site creation. Liferay document stores have three common elements – images, documents and content. The content / page creation can be simple or it can be organized using structures and displayed using templates. Liferay is built to make it easy for developers to use templates and navigation to create pages and sites in minutes.
3) Liferay Plugins – With Liferay you do not need to re-create the wheel. The common functionality you will need in building sites is most likely available through an existing Liferay plugin. The most common ones focus on web content display, sign in (user login and forgot password), social media features (such as chat, Wiki’s, Message boards, blogs, etc.) and web proxy. The web proxy feature is great because it allows you to connect to other web applications in your enterprise through Liferay so that they are all managed the same way. You can customize Liferay plugins to control how they work by changing the configuration using the control panel or portal-ext.properties. This saves time by avoiding rewriting code. If configuration changes are not enough, you can use Liferay hooks to change JSPs, CSS, and customize pages or even behaviors. Zia has a lot of experience customizing Liferay using hooks. For example, we have helped many companies customize the sign in plugin by putting in a company’s own look and feel or adding in pages and documents / terms that a user has to agree to. Hooks can also be used to integration with other systems such as LDAP, ERP, CRM, etc.
4) Fast Theme Development – Themes are a common way to customize the ‘look’ of a portal. Using themes is easy in Liferay compared to other technologies. In some cases it might be fine to build a quick site using the template. For a public facing site or sites geared towards a large number of users – themes are a must. You can customize the look and feel using basic technologies such as velocity, HTML, CSS and images.
5) Responsive Layout – A major trend in the web world is responsive layout. This allows a website to be used on any web enabled device – not just the traditional desktop. With tablets and smartphones dominating the marketplace, companies need websites that work on these smaller screen sizes. Responsive layout enables you to develop a site that works on tablets and smartphones. This ensures that your site will be relevant for longer and will reduce your total cost by extending the life of your site. Liferay does this by using CSS media and JavaScript to detect the screen width of a device. All you need to do is specify how the CSS should render the page for each of the display sizes. A great example of this is the Liferay website. Test it using your iPad, iPhone and desktop. You will see how the images decrease in size or are removed all together while the content and navigation remains the same. Companies need to incorporate this into sites today to avoid building new ones in a year or two.
There are lots of things I love about Liferay and these are just the top five. One additional feature specific to Version 6.1 that I am excited about is the out of the box previewing of PDF and Word documents. This will save companies a lot of development time.
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