Setting Up Clarity’s Site
Liferay sites are customizable spaces for building personalized digital experiences. Each site includes applications for creating content, designing pages, and more. With these features, you can bring your custom solutions to life, whether intranets, public sites, customer portals, or e-commerce storefronts. In fact, you can leverage Liferay’s multi-site capabilities to create multiple such sites in the same Liferay instance. This flexibility empowers you to build solutions tailored to your needs.
After setting up their users, Clarity’s IT team is ready to start building their public enterprise website. Here you’ll join the team as Walter Douglas, a Clarity web developer, to help implement Clarity’s site architecture. In this lesson, you’ll create the site from scratch and familiarize yourself with the Liferay site builder interface.
In a real world scenario, site contributors would work in a shared Liferay DXP environment. However, for training purposes, you’ll work in a local instance to create your own copy of a site.
Using Templates and Initializers
When creating a Liferay site, you can start from scratch, or create a site template. With site templates, you can create pages, add menus, configure widgets, create taxonomies–basically anything you can do when creating a site. You can then use that template to create multiple sites with the same basic elements. This is a great way to ensure all sites begin with the same boilerplate and follow consistent standards (e.g., accessibility). Also, since templates are designed using Liferay’s intuitive interface, they are accessible to non-technical users.
Liferay also provides site initializers for quickly duplicating site structures, content, and more. These powerful tools offer everything a site template can, with the added benefit of leveraging Liferay’s API. This grants you the ability to break free from the limitations of the site itself, enabling advanced functionalities like user and role management. However, unlike site templates, site initializers currently lack the ability to propagate changes to multiple, generated sites. Also, they are more complex and require technical knowledge.
!!! note “Site Templates vs. Site Initializers” If you want to spin up a solution, complete with user groups, roles, and maybe users, then you’ll want to use a site initializer. However, if you need to duplicate a basic site structure along with placeholder content and you want to propagate template changes to connected sites, then a site template is the right choice.
Currently, Clarity is only focused on creating a single public site. But if they ever want to provide partners with a white labeling service that allows them to spin up their own “Clarity Sites” with their own branding, site templates could help simplify and accelerate provisioning.
Exercise: Creating the Site
Now, it’s your turn to step into the role of Walter Douglas and start building the site!
To do this,
While logged in as Clarity’s admin user, open the Global Menu (
), go to the Control Panel tab, and click Sites.Click New and select Blank Site.
Enter Clarity Public Enterprise Website for name and click Add.
This creates a site and redirects you to its configuration page. Let’s take a quick tour to familiarize ourselves with Liferay’s site building UI.
Exploring the Site Building UI
Liferay’s site building UI offers an intuitive interface for creating and managing your sites, assets, and applications. You can access these features through the Site Menu (
) and Global Menu ().
The Site Menu provides access to a site’s applications. Here, you can access Liferay’s suite of applications for creating and designing site pages and content. All data for these applications is site scope, meaning other sites cannot access it. From the Site Menu, you can also navigate between sites (
) and explore the current site’s page structure (
).
The Global Menu provides access to core Liferay functionalities for your entire Liferay DXP environment. This includes managing users, creating sites, building applications, and more. Available features appear in three tabs: Applications, Commerce, and Control Panel. From here, you can also quickly switch between sites in your Liferay instance.
- Applications Tab: Includes applications that relate to relate to sites (e.g., asset libraries, workflows, publications, search).
- Commerce Tab: Includes applications for setting up e-commerce solutions (e.g., catalogs, products, price lists).
- Control Panel Tab: Includes core applications (e.g., sites, users, objects), configuration options, and platform tools.
Conclusion
Congratulations! In this lesson, you’ve set up your blank copy of the Clarity site and familiarized yourself with Liferay’s site builder UI. The next step is to configure the newly created site.
Next Up: Configuring the Clarity Site