Enhancing your Portal

Abstract

By now you’ve studied several applications provided in the Liferay package. Although Liferay has provided a wide variety of applications that you can use on your portal, they might not meet everyone’s needs. So the Liferay community users started developing their own applications and making them available to others. Liferay officially encourages such application development and provides links to many good applications provided by the community. In this chapter, we will study some of the community applications that are relevant to the development of our ISI portal. In particular, you will learn to use these portlets and gadgets:

• The Google Gadget portlet

• The Stock Ticker gadget

• The Stock Charts gadget

• The Google News gadget

• The Sun Notepad portlet

• The Google AdSense portlet

The portlets provided by the Liferay community consist of a wide variety of applications including entertainment portlets, business and finance portlets, and even games. These can meet the requirements of most portal developers. For our ISI portal, we’re particularly interested in the plugins related to finance, securities, and news. Many developers worldwide have written applications addressing these topics.