Chapter 3. Customizing the Portal

Table of Contents

1. /ext
2. /ext/downloads
3. /ext/ext-ear
4. /ext/ext-ejb
5. /ext/ext-lib
6. /ext/ext-web
7. /ext/lib
8. /ext/portlets
9. /ext/servers
10. /ext/sql
11. /ext/web-sites
12. Eclipse

The following instructions are for those who wish to customize the portal with their own portlets that will not be given back to the general public. These instructions are meant to keep custom code separated from the Liferay code so that upgrades can be made easily. The Ant scripts referred to by these instructions are only available for JBoss+Jetty, JBoss+Tomcat, OracleAS, Orion, RexIP, and WebLogic and have not yet been made available for the other supported application servers.

Follow the instructions found in Development Environment if you want to modify the actual source and contribute your changes back to the project.

Download and unzip the source to /portal. From there, type ant start. Then type ant build-ext to create /ext which is your extension environment. The location of /ext is configured in /portal/release.properties.

You should see the following directories: /ext/downloads, /ext/ext-ear, /ext/ext-ejb, /ext/ext-lib, /ext/ext-web, /ext/lib, /ext/portlets, /ext/servers, /ext/sql, and /ext/web-sites. Read /ext/readme.txt for basic instructions on how to deploy the extension EAR on the various application servers.