Legacy Knowledge Base
Published Sep. 10, 2025

Disabling Specific Built-In Portlets

Written By

Liferay Support

How To articles are not official guidelines or officially supported documentation. They are community-contributed content and may not always reflect the latest updates to Liferay DXP. We welcome your feedback to improve How To articles!

While we make every effort to ensure this Knowledge Base is accurate, it may not always reflect the most recent updates or official guidelines.We appreciate your understanding and encourage you to reach out with any feedback or concerns.

Legacy Article

You are viewing an article from our legacy "FastTrack" publication program, made available for informational purposes. Articles in this program were published without a requirement for independent editing or verification and are provided"as is" without guarantee.

Before using any information from this article, independently verify its suitability for your situation and project.

Liferay comes equipped out-of-the-box with a variety of portlets that users may add to their page. For various reasons, however, an administrator may wish to remove some of these portlets from the pool of available portlets.

Fortunately, this can be achieved either in the control panel or by editing an .xml file within Liferay.

Resolution

Method 1: Control Panel

  1. Open Control Panel.
  2. Go to Configuration.
  3. Set the desired portlet to be inactive

Method 2: Editing the XML

  1. Navigate to {$LIFERAY_HOME}\tomcat-7.0.25\webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF and locate liferay-portlet.xml. This file contains the information necessary to disable the portlets.
  2. Create a liferay-portlet-ext.xml file in this folder. Avoid editting the liferay-portlet.xml file directly. Any settings in the liferay-portlet-ext.xml will take precedence over the liferay-portlet.xml file.
  3. Edit the liferay-portlet-ext.xml with the information below:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<!DOCTYPE liferay-portlet-app PUBLIC "-//Liferay//DTD Portlet Application 5.1.0//EN" "http://www.liferay.com/dtd/liferay-portlet-app_5_1_0.dtd">

<liferay-portlet-app>

<portlet>
<portlet-name>1</portlet-name>
<struts-path>mail</struts-path>
<include>false</include>
</portlet>

</liferay-portlet-app>

where "1" is the value corresponding to the portlet number, and "mail" corresponds to the portlet name. These corresponding values are found in the liferay-portlet.xml file.  You can verify the portlet name via the portlet IDs found here, http://www.liferay.com/community/wiki/-/wiki/Main/Portlet+IDs

For example, if you want to disable the Documents and Media portlet, you would place the following in the liferay-portal-ext.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<!DOCTYPE liferay-portlet-app PUBLIC "-//Liferay//DTD Portlet Application 5.1.0//EN" "http://www.liferay.com/dtd/liferay-portlet-app_5_1_0.dtd">

<liferay-portlet-app>

<portlet>
<portlet-name>20</portlet-name>
<struts-path>document_library</struts-path>
<include>false</include>
</portlet>

</liferay-portlet-app>

Did this article resolve your issue ?

Legacy Knowledge Base