MY LIFERAY CMS TIPS & TRICKS

MY LIFERAY CMS TIPS & TRICKS

It is my honest opinion that the Liferay CMS is the redheaded stepchild of the elements included in the Liferay portal bundle. Wow, he started off by dropping bombs on Liferay! Sorry to be negative, but after using Liferay daily for a couple of years, I can say that, at best, the CMS is competent. However, it is not anywhere near as friendly or as intelligent as WordPress or other content management systems on the market.

The business reasons for choosing a portal solution are usually a complex mish-mash of functionality, system and application architecture needs. The CMS is an obvious necessity, but is rarely the deciding factor in this process. I mention all this to say that many Liferay administrators had little or no say in which product they were going to be administering. In effect, they are stuck with all the good and all the bad parts of the Liferay CMS. Because of this, I wanted to share some of my bright ideas, workarounds and best practices for the CMS included in Liferay’s Portal. I have not used the CE version and will focus only on the 6.1 EE version.  I have found enough quirks and bugs to fill pages on our internal documentation platform from Atlassian.

First off, I will start with how I activated Google Webmaster Tools, a simple process turned impossible because there is not a clear way to add a meta tag to a Liferay page. This is the solution I found that proved to be the easiest and most efficient way of accomplishing this task. Be sure to check back next time when I go over installing a local instance.

Tip #1 How to Activate your Liferay Site on Google Webmaster

• Download the html file from Google Webmaster Tools
• Upload it to the doc library with guest permissions enabled
• Create a new “hidden” page as a “URL link” with the friendly url to set the appropriate html address.