Liferay create site / page programmatically

0
votes

I have been using Liferay for work for 2 weeks. I noticed that it's a bit difficult to find good documentation and tutorials. Until now I created pages from the web portal. After I create them, I drag and drop portlets. I don't really like this approach, I would prefer to use a coding approach. Is there a way to create a website or page programmatically by defining a project as I do to create portlets?

Moreover, I am using Liferay with WebLogic 10.3.6. I want to know where liferay puts pages I created via web-portal on the file system. I suppose that a file, or something similar, is created when I declare a new site on the Liferay web-portal.

Thank you all,

Marco

4
liferayliferay-6
I will not downvote or flag this... But do know that (1) You should only include one question within the scope of a post. (2) This question asks for tutorials or additional references found outside of SO, which violates one of the flags. (3) The tag for liferay says it is written in Java -- is your question about Java, html, etc in addition to liferay? - onebree
Hi, I am sorry for (1), I will consider that the next time. About (2), this question is intended to get knowledge from other people. Finally, (3) I am asking something about Liferay, intended as framework. I think that java or similar does not tag properly this question. - MarcoSuma
Welcome to Liferay. While Liferay's documentation wasn't the best in the past, this has changed quite a bit: dev.liferay.com has some good tutorials now and is constantly being extended. Check its learning paths. The answers that have already been given are quite good already in addition to this. - Olaf Kock

4 Answers

3
votes

Yes Liferay has it's Database, all data of any Liferay object is stored in the database and / or on the file system depending on your configuration.

However, one of the functionality of Liferay is to let you create pages / sites through the UI. As documented in the Java Portal Specification and Liferay Server Documents your approach to create pages in an alternative way is possible but it is part of Liferay's Portal Services. You can use Liferay's Service (HTTP REST) API to call the related service. To access those APIs you need to configure your Liferay Server.

In case you want to do programmatically you still need to configure, enable and call those external HTTP services from your code. You should not create Liferay Objects from your own code hosted as an extension inside your Liferay Instance as that will result inconsistency in your Liferay Database / filesystem. (As in case of page creation Liferay creates a set of other related objects in it's database / filesystem.)

3
votes

In your liferay bundle you will find two plugins of interest.

First is resources-importer-web for which description says

The Resources Importer app allows front-end developers to package web content, portlet configurations, and layouts together in a theme without saving it as a compiled .LAR file thereby allowing for greater flexibility in its usage between Liferay Portal versions.
This app will automatically create associated content when other plugins are deployed that are configured to make use of the Resource Importer app.

This app installs as a Liferay service.

Second is welcome-theme which declares resources to be created by resources-importer-web. This on should be example how to create your own. Take a look at

  1. welcome-theme\WEB-INF\src\resources-importer\*
  2. welcome-theme\WEB-INF\liferay-plugin-package.properties

This feature is described at importing-resources-with-themes

0
votes

As mentioned by gabor_the_kid, Liferay stores all objects in its tables. For example, User related objects would be in user table. Liferay exposed services or API's to change the default/to add new behaviors by program but not easier than achieving it through UI. Also maintenance should be considered for going program way of creating pages or layouts etc.

0
votes

You can describe your changes using xml and use the Liferay Portal DB Setup core to create the changes in DB. The library defines the list of available xml configurations.