Preface

Liferay Portal is a leading horizontal portal product, written in Java. It has the power to provide the Intranets and Extranets of large corporations. Liferay will allow you to build your company's portal quickly, efficiently, and in a custom way to suit the needs of your corporation.

Liferay Beginner's Guide will show you how to set up your own site from scratch. Most books assume that you have knowledge of portals before working with Liferay and so include more theory than practice. However, only enthusiasm is required for reading this book as the step-by-step instructions, which follow the creation of a sample community site, will make it easy to install and configure Liferay, set up a Liferay Portal instance, and use the out-of-the-box portlets of Liferay.

By following the logical flow of the chapters and the creation of the sample site, you will set up your Liferay site in several quick and easy stages. You will start by installing Liferay in your application server or servlet container of choice. You will learn how to customize the look-and-feel of the portal, change the URL of the site, and create your own communities and organizations within the portal, then add users to them. By the end of the book, you will have a fully operational Liferay Portal and the confidence to maintain and customize it to meet your needs.