LAYOUT PlugIn

       Layout Templates are ways of choosing how your portlets will be arranged on a page. They make up the body of your page, the large area where you drag and drop your portlets to create your pages. Liferay Portal comes with several built-in layout templates, but if you have a complex page layout (especially for your home page), you may wish to create a custom layout template of your own.

          Layout Templates are the easiest plugins to create. They comprise only a few files with simple table or CSS-based containers into which portlets can be dropped, as well as a thumbnail image of what the layout looks like. This thumbnail is displayed when the end user clicks Layout Template from the Dock menu.

Creating Layout Templates #

Creation of layout templates is done in a similar manner to the creation of portlets and themes. There is a layouttpl folder inside the plugins SDK where all new layout templates reside. To create a new layout template, you run a command in this folder similar to the one you used to create a new portlet….

--The default window state is normal (in Portlets)

-- Loading process…

          Theme àLayout à Portlet

--We can apply the layouts only for pages

--All the portlet IDs are mapped with pageLayoutIDs

          Theme id à Page id à Page Layout id à Portlet id

Creation of Layout (Custom Layout) :

New > Liferay Project (select the the layout plugIn)> select ‘finish’.

In docroot >, click on <projectname>.tpl

-Drag and drop the rows and columns in the required structure whatever we want.

-Save, Deploy and Run the server

We can see our custom layout along with the default layouts in manage>page layout