blog.khax.net » liferay

Liferay wintersky theme updated, now with IE support

Karl Bowden — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:24:19 +0000

For anybody following updates the the Liferay theme I released:

Theme now looks correct in IE7 and IE8.
IE6 is functional, only sub color schemes (to do with selectors in the color scheme css), and png images need work.

Added extra option in templates/init_custom.vm:
$custom_places = true ## will replace the communities/my places menu with a simplified view hiding any public community view from non community owners. (Beta feature added to simplify the my places menu for sites that only use private pages)

Head tag also employs google chrome frame if enabled for better rendering in IE6.

Update can be installed now via the software catalog directly in Liferay.

Liferay theme release – WinterSky

Karl Bowden — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:14:12 +0000

And now announcing the release of my first Liferay theme. Details about the wordpress theme it is based on is available in my previous post (Liferay Inroads).

Requisite Screenshot

It has made a perfect intranet theme for our uses. Most appreciated is the simplified interface look.

I have finished most visual touchups. Things left on my to do list are submenu indicators, tools menu rearrangement and rethemeing the chat portal.

If anybody has ideas on integrating the chat portal visuals closer I’d be happy to listen.

DOWNLOAD and INSTALL: The theme should now be available from the theme installer in liferay-5.2.2 installs and the WinterSky theme page on Liferay is here.

Now to work on some new portals. Till next time.

Liferay inroads

Karl Bowden — Mon, 25 May 2009 13:29:12 +0000

After installing Alfresco and admittedly suffering a few hiccups with it I seem to be making enough progress that I also decided to investigate Liferay as an alternative to Plone as our intranet portal and internal information site.

There are some areas that Plone really does well such as the content type handling and content workflow. But lack of documentation in other areas has left me pulling my hair out at times, such as ldap user and group integration with openldap and active directory, debugging modules and some new gotcha each time something is updated in a buildout.

Liferay has also had a steep learning curve, but I found it no where as bad as Plone. No messing in the ZMI for setting up ldap auth, changing database backends or setting portal defaults. Just one config file. I have found the speed surprising compared to Plone on the same hardware too. With java webapps I have tried in the past I have been left with the impression of them being bloated, memory hungry and slow. But I am slowly coming around thanks to Alfresco and Liferay.

It took a long time to get the liferay-portal-5.2.2.war running in the ubuntu jaunty tomcat6 environment and it still had a couple of issues so I just went back to running the liferay-timcat6 bundle which does run well without issue. I guess that is the price I pay for avoiding java for so long.

To make it suitable for my needs the interface needed to be cleaned up and I decided to just create a fresh theme which can be seen in the screenshot below. The theme is called Winter Sky and is adapted from MMOZINE, and is available from the Liferay community plugin section.

Other additions over the classic liferay theme are multiple level navigation menus and print styling css targets. Which were just a couple of extras that made things much more usable for my victims…. oh.. target users.

There are still a few visual glitches to fix, but everything seems usable and I will post the link to the Liferay project page once it is approved.