Bradley Wood's Liferay Tips

“portletpreferences” table in database is a great place to look when trying to see what portlet id and preferences are needed for a portlet when embedding the portlet

$nav_item.getLayout().getExpandoBridge().getAttribute(“custom_field_attribute_name”)

This code logs you out and then reloads the current community instead of sending you to the guest community.

setting look and feel settings on a non-instancable portlet embedded in the theme

(Source: liferay.com)

to add localizations in a theme, add this compile section your your build.xml and the languages in the usual location
- this can be useful if you add your own custom settings that the keys are not in the portal’s language.properties file.

(Source: liferay.com)

I came across some velocity variables (1.6.4) that could help you save a couple lines of code.

$velocityCount: Current index of the foreach loop (starts at 1)
$velocityHasNext: Checks if there is another item in the loop

-Freemarker version

(Source: velocity.apache.org)

This week I have been exploring the world of mobile web. One issue I ran into was not being able to see what css classes exsist while viewing Liferay from an iPhone or Android phone. Here is a simple javascript link that can be added in your portal_normal.vm file.

While in a mobile browser you can click the link to see what css classes you can use to target your mobile experience

to use these features in Liferay 6.1 just add

@import “compass”;

at the top of your custom.css file in your theme.

Resources: SaSS and Compass

here are some things I like about it:

COMPASS:
@include border-radius(4px);
OUTPUTTED CSS:
-moz-border-radius: 4px;
-webkit-border-radius: 4px;
-o-border-radius: 4px;
-ms-border-radius: 4px;
-khtml-border-radius: 4px;
border-radius: 4px;

SASS lets you set variables and use them throughout your code:
$dark-blue: #2C4762;
$mobile-view-width: 300px;
$default-margin: 20px;
$calc-width: $mobile-view-width - $default-margin;

1. Use Table Based Layouts for Browsers IE 6 & 7 (#if ($browserSniffer.isIe($request) && $browserSniffer.getMajorVersion($request) )

2. Set “main-content” class to be the layout name. That way you can target via CSS when this layout is in use.

3. Remember Layouts can be embedded in a theme or deployed to the entire Liferay Server.

To View un-minified CSS add “css_fast_load=0” to your url
To View un-minified JS add “js_fast_load=0” to your url

http://localhost:8080/web/guest/?css_fast_load=0