5.2 Creating and Maintaining Sites

Sites are very much like Organizations except that they are not hierarchical. They are designed instead to be islands to themselves which anyone from any organization (or from no organization at all) can join. Use Sites in any situation where you need to cut across the organizational structure of your portal, or where you have a site that would apply to almost anybody. For example, the home page for the Intranet is probably best placed in a site that any member of the portal can access.

Sites are groupings of pages and users based on shared interests or skills. And, a user can belong to any number of sites. Examples of sites might include:

  • A human resources site where staff members discuss issues related to health insurance.

  • A tech support site of users who have the skills to provide technical support to an organization.

  • A marketing site where marketing personnel shares marketing and corporate information.

The Dashboard default home page is in a site called Guest, and this is where you would put your public web site. As you can see, there are several scenarios in which you would want to use something like a site instead of an organization, and this is why they have a distinct role within Liferay Portal.

Sites can be created and managed in two ways. The first is through the Control Panel, like every other user/page collection. The second is through the My Sites portlet, which can be added to any page. Why two ways? Because the My Sites portlet also doubles as a way to navigate from site to site, and allows users to browse the list of sites.

Permissions can be assigned to users to delegate site management tasks. For more information, see Section 12.0, Portal and Site Permissions.

Every site must have at least one page (represented by a tab) to be active, but there is no limit on the number of pages that a site can have.

After a site is named, define its characteristics and add content pages. Consider the following:

  • Every site must have at least one page (represented by a tab) to be active, but there is no limit on the number of pages that a site can have.

  • Pages can be private or public. A public page can be accessed by a guest who has the appropriate URL. A private page can only be accessed by users who are logged in and assigned to the site.

  • URLs must be defined for public and private pages.

  • A default look and feel can be set for all private and public pages.

NOTE:You are already a member of the organizations you create. By creating an organization, you become both a member and have the Organization Owner role, which gives you full rights to the organization.

To create and configure sites:

5.2.1 Creating a New Site

To create a site:

  1. From the Control Panel, under Sites, select Sites, click Add, and then select Community Site.

  2. Name the new site and optionally add a description.

  3. Under Membership Type, select one of the following to indicate the type of site:

    • Open: Appears in the My Sites portlet and users can join and leave the site whenever they want.

    • Restricted: Appears in the My Sites portlet but users must request membership and be approved before joining.

    • Private: Does not appear in the My Sites portlet. A site administrator manually adds users.

  4. Deselect the Active check box to deactivate the site.

  5. Select Categorization and specify keywords in the Tags field to identify the site and leverage the portals tagging feature.

  6. Click Save.

5.2.2 Performing Actions on a Site

To configure a site:

  1. From the Control Panel, under Sites, select Sites.

  2. Click Actions next to the site and select from the options to update and configure the site.

  3. Click Save.

5.2.3 Updating Site Settings

Various settings can be configured for each site including a friendly URL, a custom logo, generation of a sitemap structure to notify search engines, and monitoring through Google Analytics.

To update the settings for a site:

  1. From the Control Panel, under Sites, select Sites.

  2. Click Actions next to the site and select Site Administration.

  3. Under Configuration, select Site Settings.

  4. Select from the following options to specify settings for the site:

    • Staging: Activate staging.

    • Site URL: Specify a public and private virtual host that maps to the public and private friendly URL. Also specify a friendly URL that is used for both public and private pages.

    • Sitemap: Generate a sitemap to notify Google and Yahoo of the structure of the site pages.

    • Analytics: Specify a Google Analytics ID to setup tracking for site pages in an existing Google Analytics configuration.

  5. Click Save.