My background is as a website designer, making sites with Drupal and also doing the frontend. With my new job im just doing the frontend, and ive been asked by my boss to look into liferay (most people here are java developers), from a 'frontend perspective'.
So, how themable is liferay? Do you have (easy) control over the exact html outputted?
Bit of an open ended question I know but im not really sure how to be more specific....
Thanks
You don't have much control, because LR html pages are huge. it is a composition of Portal page and html sections of particular portlets. It can be 3 - 10 of them on a page, and you style them all within the huge portal Page ... That's why there is quite complicated CSS hierarchy and you should be a little skilled in CSS to feel comfortable in such an environment, also even if you turn off caching on tomcat and property file, sometimes you have to manually empty browser cache to reload the page properly.
But I must say that LR UX developers are the best I know and it's all very professionally done. Pleasure to work with it.
There are 4 important points :
It's relatively easy to get into it with cooperation with a java developer. Because you must learn how to set it up on the web server (tomcat) - the easiest way is to install the bundle and run it. But you also need to checkout the source code of LR, look at themes (login guest, password empty) and do some reverse engineering. The theme is deployed (via Ant) into a running instance of LR. This is relatively doable even without any Java daveloper's help. After you run "$ant create" in the theme directory, it builds a template theme were you make your themes and deploy them. But there must be a little bit of Ant specific setting in regard to PATHs on the filesystem.
The theme development is straightforward, you just create a _diff of the classic LR theme - you modify an already done theme. The purpose is, that the LR javascript & CSS framework and the CSS hierarchy is quite complex and this is the best way possible.
create portal-ext.properties in tomcat/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/, add this line include-and-override=portal-developer-ext.properties and create portal-developer-ext.properties in the same location with this content, which makes UI development JS & CSS much more friendly.
theme.css.fast.load=false
theme.images.fast.load=false
javascript.fast.load=false
javascript.log.enabled=false
com.liferay.portal.servlet.filters.strip.StripFilter=false
com.liferay.portal.servlet.filters.minifier.MinifierFilter=false
layout.template.cache.enabled=false
combo.check.timestamp=true
freemarker.engine.cache.storage=soft:1
freemarker.engine.modification.check.interval=0
openoffice.cache.enabled=false
velocity.engine.resource.manager.cache.enabled=false
com.liferay.portal.servlet.filters.cache.CacheFilter=false
com.liferay.portal.servlet.filters.themepreview.ThemePreviewFilter=true
Also there is alloy framework build on top of YUI CSS & JS framework that provides you with a lot of "widgets" and plugins to work with.
Simply put, it very interesting thing to work with and one can learn a lot, but must be willing to spend some time to get into it.
Related
VS2013 update 5, MVC5 using Areas
I have a stand-alone function programmed for a website. The functionality is a specific user interface to collect survey responses in a particular way. It has several controllers, a model and a group of views. The functionality is completely contained in an Area of the project, except for the Shared _Layout file that provides the main menu for consistency.
'Is it possible for me to' / 'how do I' compile this Area into a single or set of .dll file(s) that I could then add conveniently to other websites? I'm assuming creating something for transfer/download is very standard functionality. For example, I used Elmah.MVC for this site. What I want to do is pretty much create a package that can be downloaded in a similar way to how we integrate Elmah.MVC into a site. (Be certain I'm not talking about creating error logging software, I'm only using Elmah.MVC as an example of software that is easily integrated into other website applications.)
I've never compiled any website functionality into a .dll(s) for use elsewhere and would appreciate either some specific guidance, or perhaps what would be easier is to provide a link with a good step by step tutorial or explanation for how to do this. Most of what I've found on the web describes bits and pieces of doing this, but it's not enough for me to feel confident with it.
It seems to me there are a lot of 'moving parts' to taking a particular piece of an MVC application and turning it into something that is easily added to other projects.
A particular issue I don't quite grasp is the difference in downloaded packages between getting code and getting just the .dll(s). For instance, when I download an MVC5 site, I get controllers, models and views, but when I download Elmah I get a .dll and no code files. Also, I do understand the concept of transforms, but I'm just struggling right now with even getting from my programmed application into a 'package' regardless of the transforms that make it easy to integrate into another website.
These are just some of my questions I have about how to perform this particular process in developing deliverable and/or shareable software.
What you are looking to do is create a portable MVC Area project. A Portable Area is a set of reusable multi page functionality can be dropped into an application to provide rich functionality without having to custom build functionality that is literally the same in every application. An MVC Portable Area is really just a dll that contains the views, controllers, scripts, etc… needed to use in a website that is either a Web Forms website or an MVC website. A developer can use them for a reusable widget or a complete engine. I have actually used them for both. Here is a link with some basic info to get started. http://elegantcode.com/2012/04/06/mvc-portable-areas/
Is there a module or similar things that support skinning in NodeJS? I want to build a NodeJS website, and want to be able to re-skin the website as I like without much efforts, like in Wordpress.
Is skinning supported in NodeJS?
If you're interested in building a website in Node.js and don't need a wordpress-style cms behind it, there are few projects that can help you out.
Have you looked into Bootstrap? It's built with less which you can easily plug in to your Express setup (see the guide here, using the command line executable to set up a new project you can specify less like this: express --css less myapp and it will do all the work for you)
In the bootstrap less file are several variables you can use to change the colours, fonts, sizes, etc, and it's also got a lot of helpers for grid layouts and responsive designs.
It even includes a few useful javascript plugins too which make the ui nicer with less work.
There are also a lot of sites with themes and theme generators around which then work on top of bootstrap, and may achieve what you want.
Plugging in this sort of solution (whether bootstrap or other) is about as close as you can come to getting skinning for node; As otherwise suggested if you're looking for a CMS out of the box as well, probably best to look for another platform like Wordpress.
Node.js is not a content management system. It is a platform on top of which you could built a web server with a content management system. To answer your question you need to be looking for node.js based content management systems that support themes.
The only node.js CMS that I am aware of is Calipso. It's still pretty alpha-stage. It may have some theming support, but it is nowhere near as polished as Wordpress.
Also is there a reason why you want to use node.js? I mean there is nothing wrong in using Wordpress for creating a themeable website - it is just awesome for that.
If you just want another OnlineShop, or maybe a blog, i think nodejs is maybe not your right choose as Jed Watson told.
If your requirements are more complicated, and you want a quick and easy implementation of a nice web interface, and you have html, javascript, and css knowledge... I strongly recommend you just trying to work with MEAN.js
It puts together MongoDB Expressjs, AngularJs, and NodeJs.
Use this, for example with a yeoman fullstack constructor and you will have a powerful webapp, with user autentication, and much more in a few minutes.
After that, the use of jade, less, scss, and similar languages of modelling the front, and the easy way you can also model collections in the back, is for me the best combination you´ll find for creating a website today.
Hope it´ll help you
King Regards
Hi:
In our application,there are so many sub pages and menus,for example:
the main menu for the whole site:
Index/Document/News/SysConfig and etc.
And inside the Sysconfig page,there are also other menus like :
user managment,roles,logs... and etc.
Now we use the iframe to make the layout of the site,we change the related iframe's src attribute according to user's choice. but I wonder if this is a good idea?
I thought use the tempalte,for example the apache tiles in jsp and the masterpage in asp.net.
I wonder which is the best pratice?
Best Practice would be to go the templated route ...
I haven't really looked into web accessibility for a long time ... but in the past when I used to work on externally facing sites, using frames of any sort was a big no-no. Screen readers would have problems with frames including iframes. I'm not sure if the current generation of screen-readers handle them better.
There's also the search result/deep linking issues to consider. For example, will your google result link point directly to the page in the iframe? do you have to do a hack to redirect the user to the main page?
Also going the templated route may not be that difficult as long as you don't have a lot of content to migrate. There are fantastic content management solutions out there like Wordpress, or Drupal and Joomla if you have more complex needs.
I am developing a Java EE based web application. We have a very limited time to come up with a alpha version and trying to decide on a web framework to use. It has to be something easy to learn but powerful. Standard JSP/Servlet is not an option here due to the time it takes for the development. Appreciate if anyone could advice. Current options are Wicket and GWT. (JSF is also an option)
Wicket is component-based and comes with a bunch of standard components (like pagination, auto-complete, data grids, form handling etc.). If you want to create a standard panel (with the possibility for easy re-use) just create your HTML fragment to use a template (with wicket:id attributes wherever you want to bind dynamic content or sub-components) and a corresponding Java file. Furthermore, you can attach specific CSS and JS files.
In my opinion, Wicket development is good value (functionality) for money. And you get a lot of built-in AJAX functionality without even writing (not reading) any JS. E.g., change the model for a component, attach the component to an AjaxRequestTarget and the panel is automagically repainted via DOM manipulation.
For a quick overview and intro I recommend Wicket in Action by Dashorst & Hillenius. (And don't miss out on other great resources.)
Everything depends on your application. I don't have experience with Wicket, not much with JSF. I have big experience with GWT.
GWT is good if your application has to be mostly dynamic. In GWT you can change everything on the page not even calling the server. GWT is compiled to Javascript. On the other hand, if you have big project, it is quite frustrating if your application in development starts few minutes, because it has a lot of code to compile to Javascript. My opinion: it is not good for big projects.
If you don't need to change your pages so much client-side, I would use JSF2 (or Wicket, if I knew it).
Have a look at this comparison of Wicket and GWT, this may help you decide for yourself:
Wicket and GWT compared with code
I'm looking for a free, simple and efficient CMS for building website for a small company.
Prerequisites are:
The website is nothing more than a presentation - with informative content and gallery. The website should contain a nice-looking gallery with js/ajax flavour. Nothing more is planned for now, but it would be nice if CMS would feature some more generic modules/extensions in case I would like to use them in future.
Design templates should be easy to adopt and change.
Coding as little as possible.
I thought about Drupal, but is there any other CMS which would better fit to these requirements?
Please don't list available CMS-es here. Give it a reason!
Wordpress is nice too :p It has a big community behind...
I say Drupal.
Drupal is really good in content management. You can create different content types, and assign them fields (in Drupal 6, you will need the CCK contrib module). You can create a gallery with Views and it's output plugins. There are dozens of them, using different layout and JavaScript effects (mostly different jQuery plugins, but there are plugins for lightbox and thickbox also).
Drupal has a group of themes called "starter themes". These themes are half-ready, and it is very easy to create your own custom themes with them. All you need is to create a subtheme. (Basically making an info file and copy some other files. There are really a lot of howtos out there.) There are also starter themes for 960 (CSS framework), so you can make the site layout really fast. The most famous starter theme is called Zen. You might want to use that.
Except for the theme, I don't think that you have to write any code. Writing a theme for Drupal is not hard, since it uses PHP to render the themes.
Still in beta (0.5) phase but looking very promising: Orchard, a new ASP.NET MVC based CMS created by the people from Microsoft.
Orchard will create shared components for building ASP.NET applications and extensions, and specific applications that leverage these components to meet the needs of end-users, scripters, and developers. Additionally, we seek to create partnerships with existing application authors to help them achieve their goals. Orchard is delivered as part of the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery under the CodePlex Foundation. It is licensed under a New BSD license, which is approved by the OSI.
The intended output of the Orchard project is three-fold:
Individual .NET-based applications that appeal to end-users , scripters, and developers
A set of re-usable components that makes it easy to build such applications
A vibrant community to help define these applications and extensions
In the near term, the Orchard project is focused on delivering a .NET-based CMS application that will allow users to rapidly create content-driven Websites, and an extensibility framework that will allow developers and customizers to provide additional functionality through module extensions and themes.
It depends on what kind of CMS you are after
pity you don't like programming otherwise i would suggest django, an awsome CMS framework
if you are after something simple like a few static pages and a news feed or something like that then wordpress might suit your needs well, except i have found i don't like how it handles gallery's
if you need anything more, like more advanced custom content types for products, i would recommend Joomla or Drupal, and have plug-ins that has good support for photo galleys
Joomla! will probably be a better choice. It is very easy to use and is highly extensible.
Have a look at:
CMS Made Simple
CMS Made Simple provides a fast and
easy way to create a professional web
site and manage its content, whether
it's for a small business or a
multinational corporation!
Features
General Features
SEO Friendly URLs
Integrated and online help
Modular and extensible
Easy user and group management
Group-based permission system
Full template support, for unlimited looks without changing a line of content
Easy wizard based install and upgrade procedures
Minimal server requirements
Admin panel with multiple language support
Content hierarchy with unlimited depth and size
Integrated file manager w/ upload capabilities
Integrated audit log
Friendly support in forums and irc
Small footprint
Design Features
Accessibility WAI, WCGA, Section 508
XHTML and CSS compliant
Auto-generated menu
Every page can have different theme
Design protected from content editors
Multiple content areas on one page
If you have a little C# experience then you can try Umbraco.
It is a very powerfull CMS written in C# for ASP.NET
It is one of the most powerfull both free and commercial CMS out there.
i recommend to check out the Feature Matrix so you can see if it fulfills your needs.
As an example http://asp.net uses Umbraco
have you tried DotNetNuke ?