Configuring Clarity’s Site

Now that you have a local copy of Clarity’s public enterprise website, you can begin configuring it. Clarity’s website aims to be accessible and user-friendly by all, engaging the full spectrum of their global audiences.

In this lesson, you’ll learn about critical settings like membership types, localization, and accessibility.

Configure the public enterprise website.

Site Membership

Liferay provides three different types of site membership: open, restricted, and private. This configuration determines how freely users can join your site.

Open: Users can join and leave the site whenever they want.
Restricted: Users must request membership to join the site.
Private: Site administrators must explicitly invite and add users for them to join the site.

Choosing the appropriate membership type establishes the first level of security. It sets a baseline for user access to site content, enabling you to restrict sensitive data and content exclusively to site members.

Determine the site's membership type.

Since Clarity’s website is a public enterprise website, it should be open and accessible to a wide audience. This way, guests can become members to receive updates on Clarity’s products, sign up for events, submit distributor applications, and more. As such, Clarity will select the Open membership type, enabling users to join and leave freely.

Localization

In addition to site membership, Clarity wants to explore how to best reach their global audience. Liferay provides robust localization features for creating websites that speak the language of your users. From configuring available site languages to localizing site URLs, you can help ensure Clarity’s messages resonate with their international visitors. By default, every site uses the languages enabled at the instance level, but Clarity wants to limit the languages available in their site.

Manage available site languages.

Virtual Host

Setting the virtual host connects a domain name (e.g., www.helloworld.com) to a site. This can be a full domain or a subdomain (e.g., partners.helloworld.com), so you can differentiate between multiple sites on the same Liferay DXP server.

NOTE
To direct traffic to virtual hosts set in Liferay, you must update your domain’s DNS settings to route to your Liferay DXP instance’s IP address.

Set the site's virtual hosts.

Clarity wants to set their site’s virtual host to www.clarityvisionsolutions.com. They also want to set a virtual host for Spanish (www.solucionesdeclaridad.com) to better engage their international audience.

Accessibility

Site accessibility is essential for ensuring everyone can access and interact with your website. Liferay provides an accessibility menu to make it easier for users to enable accessibility properties. Once enabled, users can access the menu by pressing Tab twice and then pressing Enter.

Enabling the accessibility menu provides users access to these configurations:

Underlined Links: Force underline effect for all links.
Increased Text Spacing: Increase horizontal spacing between text characters.
Expanded Text: Expand all truncated text.
Reduced Motion: Stop all motion and animations.

Press Tab twice and hit Enter to access the accessibility menu.

Accessibility is a core principle that should be woven into the design and development of any public site. Just like Clarity offers premium eyewear for all, their website should be equally inclusive. While enabling the accessibility menu is a good start, you’ll learn more about this topic later in this course.

Exercise: Adding Users to a Site

When you create a public site, all unauthenticated visitors can view its public pages and content by default. For authenticated site members, you can grant additional privileges using site-scoped roles. While most users in your course workspace are already members of the enterprise website, Christian Carter and Harper Robert are not.

Here, you’ll add them to Clarity’s public site as Ian Miller.

Sign in using these credentials:
- Email: ian.miller@clarityvisionsolutions.com
- Password: learn
Open the Global Menu () and select Clarity Public Enterprise Website in the right panel.
Open the Site Menu (), expand People, and select Memberships.
Click New.
Select Christian Carter and Harper Roberts.
Click Done.
Great! Now both users are members of the site and you can assign site roles to them.
Click Actions () for Christian Carter and select Assign Roles.
Select the Site Content Contributor role and click Done.
This enables Christian Carter to make contributions to Clarity’s website content.
Repeat steps 7-8 to assign the Site Content Contributor role to Harper Roberts as well.

Great! You’ve added two team members to Clarity’s enterprise website. Next, you’ll continue configuring the site to ensure it is public and accessible for their target audience.

Exercise: Configuring the Site

Successful public sites often increase brand awareness, showcase products, and convert visitors to customers. To this end, Clarity wants to set easily findable virtual hosts, empower guests to register as site members, configure select language options, and enable accessibility tools.

Here, you’ll configure these settings as Ian Miller.

Verify you’re viewing the Clarity Public Enterprise Website.
Open the Site Menu (), expand Configuration, and select Site Settings.
Go to Site Configuration and open the Details tab.
Add this description: Elevate Your Brand with Premium Eyewear: Discover premium craftsmanship, innovative lenses, and designs that help your brand stand out.
Set membership type to Open.
This enables guests to freely access the site’s public pages and content and become site members.
Click Save.
Go to the Site URL tab.
Set the friendly URL to /clarity.
This URL is used by site pages and is appended to http://localhost:8080/web.
Set the site’s virtual host for the default language to www.clarityvisionsolutions.com.
Setting the virtual host connects a domain name (e.g., www.helloworld.com) to a site.
Click Add to add an extra virtual host for Spanish with the URL www.solucionesdeclaridad.com.
This way, Clarity's Spanish speaking audience can access the site using a localized domain.

NOTE
These virtual host settings will not take effect until you’ve either configured your local PC’s hosts file; or, routed your domain’s DNS settings to the Liferay DXP instance’s IP address.
Click Save.
Return to the Site Settings page and go to Localization.
Select the radio button to define a custom default language and additional available languages.
For now, Clarity only wants to support English (United States) and Spanish (Spain) for content localization on their site.
Use the left arrow () button to remove all languages except English and Spanish.

TIP
To select multiple languages at a time, hold the CTRL key.
Click Save.
Return to the Site Settings page and go to Accessibility.
Check the box to enable the accessibility menu.
This empowers users to press Tab twice and hit Enter to access a menu for configuring their accessibility settings.
Click Update.

Congratulations! You’ve configured Clarity’s site settings. Together, these configurations help satisfy Clarity’s basic website needs to fulfill its intended purpose of promoting products to an international audience. Liferay also provides many other site configurations, including SEO, cookie handling, session timeouts.

Next, you’ll update Clarity’s default home page and landing page.

Exercise: Configuring the Instance’s Default Home and Landing Pages

By default, visiting http://localhost:8080/ directs users to the first created site of a Liferay instance. For Clarity, this currently navigates to their default Clarity Vision Solutions site, instead of Clarity Public Enterprise Website.

Here, you’ll update the default home and landing pages for your instance as the Clarity Admin user.

NOTE
Certain instance and system-level settings can only be configured by a user that’s been assigned the Administrator role.

Sign in using these credentials:
- Email: admin@clarityvisionsolutions.com
- Password: learn
Open the Global Menu (), go to the Control Panel tab, and click Instance Settings.
Under Platform, click Instance Configuration and go to the General tab.
For Home URL, enter /web/clarity.
This sets the default page displayed when you access http://localhost:8080/.
For Default Landing Page, enter /web/clarity.
This specifies the page users are redirected to after logging in.
For Default Logout Page, enter /web/clarity.
This defines the page users are redirected to after signing out.
Click Save.

Great! Now, when users visit http://localhost:8080/ and log out or log in, they’re directed to the home page for Clarity’s public enterprise website.

Conclusion

Site configurations like membership types, localization, and accessibility are essential for creating inclusive and user-friendly digital experiences. Establishing foundational site settings provides a stable, compliant baseline that is ready to host customer-facing content.

Next, you’ll add new pages to Clarity’s site.