Liferay 6.2 User Interface Development

A comprehensive guide to user interface development with Liferay Portal

Overview

• Create eye-catching themes, develop responsive layouts, and write portlets with various technologies that ensure efficiency and performance
• Showcase the latest features in the user interface of Liferay 6.2 and provide solutions to real problems on recent projects
• Implement Alloy User Interface to achieve the best page appearance and generate reports
• This comprehensive guide is packed with screenshots for illustration and a lot of code examples that are ready to run

In Detail

Liferay employs a specialized theming system that allows you to change the look and feel of the user interfaces. Liferay Portal provides layout templates in order to describe how various columns and rows are arranged to display portlets. It also provides themes that can be used to customize the overall look and feel of web sites and web pages. As a developer, by using the right tools to create and manipulate themes with Liferay Portal 6.2, you can get your site to look any way you want it to; however the Liferay theming system can be difficult to get started with. This practical guide is a well organized manual to help you get started with Liferay as a programmer.

“Liferay 6.2 User Interface Development” will show you the efficient ways to develop custom user interface components for a Liferay Portal website. You will learn how to create themes, write page layouts, develop portlets, and use Alloy User Interface widgets. This book will prepare you with a full set of tools and skills for the development of Liferay user interfaces.

“Liferay 6.2 User Interface Development” guides you through the components of the Liferay Portal user interface step-by-step.The Liferay tags, analysis of the Alloy UI widgets, and the anatomy of a theme are explained in detail. Explanations are accompanied with screenshots and code that executes smoothly. This book explains how the components are rendered one after another into a complete HTML file.

You will learn how to create and upgrade a theme, how to write a responsive page layout and how to develop generic-style portlets, Spring MVC portlets, and Vaadin portlets. The book will help you in using Alloy UI, jQuery, Ext JS, and Dojo Toolkit in Liferay.

By the end of this book, you will have gained experience in developing all the user interface components for the Liferay Portal and know the latest ways of using tags, composing widgets, and writing Ajax calls and developing portlets, page layouts, and themes efficiently.

What you will learn from this book

• Set up Liferay IDE for rapid development of plugins
• Use Compass to write Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets
• Develop a responsive theme
• Integrate Google Analytics in a theme
• Create a page layout that responds to the change in width of the browser screen
• Write generic-style portlets, Spring MVC portlets, and Vaadin portlets
• Use jQuery, Ext JS, and Dojo Toolkit in a portlet
• Develop a portlet using tools like OpenXava
• Create an image gallery with Alloy UI
• Construct an Alloy UI video player
• Use Liferay tags for rich page rendering
• Develop a mobile user interface, create reports, and enable searching

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Customizing Your Liferay Portal
Chapter 2: Basic Theme
Chapter 3: Layout Template
Chapter 4: Content Collaboration and Publishing
Chapter 5: Portlet
Chapter 6: JavaScript Frameworks and Portlets
Chapter 7: Advanced Theme
Chapter 8: Understanding Alloy UI/YUI
Chapter 9: Using UI Taglib
Chapter 10: Responsive Mobile Theme, Reporting, Searching, and More