Web design with Liferay

Question

I am conversant with Java EE web development but new to liferay and portals. I humbly request some guidance on how to develop webapps using liferay. My confusion stems from:

1. Is Liferay a CMS or a container?
2. How do you deploy webapps (NOT portlets)? Can you have localhost:8080/WebAppName...?
3. Can the portal be fully customized to have a 'normal' website look (without the large buttons and 'Swing' look?

Please point me in the right direction of any resources showing the steps of developing and deploying a full website using Liferay.

Answer 1

Liferay provides a portlet runtime. It comes bundled with tomcat for convenience, although it could be deployed to other servlet/Java EE containers. It provides portlets out of the box that mean it can be used as a CMS, although other products may be better if that is what you are after. It is possible to theme the applications it runs. Whilst you could deploy other wars to the container, you may want to ask yourself why.

Its been a couple of years since Ive used it, and I always felt the documentation was patchy. You may need to just download it and play (or roll the dice on a few web tutorials). You'll probably end up in the code. We ended up changing some core code.

Good luck!

Answer 2

I would suggest the much improved documentation starting here:

http://www.liferay.com/documentation/liferay-portal/6.1/development