Tag Archives: Liferay best practices

What are some of the best practices for Liferay? – Using three separate GPTs

Generated using my GPT – Liferay Guide – Via official sources of Liferayhttps://chat.openai.com/g/g-4G5XuBdpL-liferay-guide-via-official-sources-of-liferay

Adhering to best practices in Liferay ensures that you leverage the platform effectively for enterprise solutions. Here are some key best practices to consider:

1. Modular Development: Embrace Liferay’s modular development approach using OSGi. Develop customizations in modules, rather than monolithic plugins, for better manageability and upgradeability.

2. Use Liferay’s APIs: Leverage Liferay’s extensive APIs for custom development. This ensures compatibility and takes advantage of Liferay’s built-in features and best practices.

3. Front-End Development: Utilize Liferay’s front-end frameworks (e.g., AlloyUI, Liferay Clay) to maintain consistency in UI/UX design and to ensure compatibility with different browsers and devices.

4. Performance Tuning: Regularly monitor and optimize performance. This includes database tuning, proper caching strategies, and optimizing assets like JavaScript and CSS.

5. Security Best Practices: Implement security best practices such as regular audits, using Liferay’s roles and permissions effectively, and keeping Liferay and its dependencies up to date.

6. Effective Use of Liferay DXP Features: Take full advantage of Liferay DXP’s features like staging, workflow, and audience targeting to enhance the user experience.

7. Customization with Hooks and Ext Plugins: Use hooks and ext plugins judiciously for customizations that cannot be achieved through Liferay’s built-in features or APIs.

8. Version Control and Continuous Integration: Implement version control (e.g., Git) and continuous integration practices for efficient and error-free deployment.

9. Backup and Disaster Recovery: Regularly back up your Liferay instance and database. Have a disaster recovery plan in place to handle unforeseen events.

10. Documentation and Knowledge Transfer: Maintain comprehensive documentation for your customizations and configurations. This is crucial for future maintenance and knowledge transfer.

11. Community Engagement: Engage with the Liferay community through forums, blogs, and events. This can provide additional insights and help in problem-solving.

12. Regular Updates and Maintenance: Keep your Liferay installation updated with the latest patches and versions. This helps in leveraging new features and maintaining security.

13. Testing and Quality Assurance: Implement rigorous testing (unit, integration, system) to ensure custom developments work as intended and do not adversely impact other parts of the system.

14. Accessibility Compliance: Ensure that your Liferay site is accessible, following standards like WCAG, to make it usable for people with different abilities.

15. Mobile Responsiveness: Design your sites and applications to be responsive, ensuring they work well on various screen sizes and devices.

Remember, these best practices are guidelines and should be adapted based on your specific use case and organizational needs. For more detailed and situation-specific best practices, consulting Liferay’s official documentation or reaching out to their support can be beneficial.

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

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Generated using my GPT – Tech Tower Guidehttps://chat.openai.com/g/g-cELlz9ieP-tech-tower-guide

Liferay, known for its powerful and flexible digital experience platform (DXP), can be optimized through several best practices:

1. Modular Development: Emphasize on modular development by using OSGi modules. This approach helps in creating scalable, maintainable, and reusable components.

2. Service Layer Abstraction: Maintain a clear separation between your business logic and Liferay’s core functionality. This abstraction ensures that your custom code is decoupled from the platform, making it easier to manage and upgrade.

3. Performance Optimization: Implement caching strategies, optimize database interactions, and manage resource-intensive operations carefully to ensure optimal performance. Regular performance testing is crucial.

4. Front-End Development: Utilize Liferay’s built-in front-end frameworks and tools. Ensure that the UI is responsive and accessible. Employ web standards and best practices in front-end development.

5. Security Practices: Follow Liferay’s security recommendations. Regularly update Liferay and its dependencies to protect against vulnerabilities. Implement proper authentication, authorization, and data validation practices.

6. Customization with Extensions: Prefer extensions over core modifications. Use Liferay’s extension points to add or modify functionality without altering the core codebase, which simplifies upgrades.

7. Effective Use of Liferay APIs: Utilize Liferay’s APIs for various functionalities instead of creating custom solutions from scratch. This leverages Liferay’s built-in capabilities and ensures compatibility.

8. Code Quality and Standards: Adhere to coding standards and best practices. Conduct regular code reviews and utilize static code analysis tools to maintain high-quality code.

9. Version Control and Continuous Integration: Implement version control using systems like Git. Use continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices for efficient and error-free deployments.

10. Backup and Disaster Recovery: Regularly backup Liferay data and configurations. Have a disaster recovery plan in place to handle system failures without significant data loss or downtime.

11. Training and Documentation: Ensure that your team is well-trained on Liferay and maintains comprehensive documentation for any custom development or configurations.

12. Community Engagement: Engage with the Liferay community. The community is a rich source of information, support, and innovation.

Adopting these practices will help in maximizing the effectiveness and longevity of your Liferay implementation. For more detailed insights and guidance on technology and management, feel free to visit our website at www.HarwaniSystems.in and our blog at www.TechAndTrain.com/blog. For further discussions, you can also contact us at Neil@HarwaniSystems.in.

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Generated using my GPT Liferay Helper – Works on open internet: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-uOPo2Wffl-liferay-helper-works-on-open-internet

Best practices for Liferay development and deployment encompass a range of areas, including coding standards, performance optimization, security, and deployment strategies. Here are some key best practices:

1. Adhere to MVC Architecture: Liferay follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. Adhering to this pattern in your custom developments ensures maintainability and scalability.

2. Use Liferay Service Builder: For creating persistence layers, the Liferay Service Builder is highly recommended. It simplifies database operations and ensures consistency across different database systems.

3. Modular Development: Embrace OSGi-based modular development. Develop features as separate modules rather than monolithic applications. This enhances maintainability and allows for easier upgrades.

4. Liferay’s API and Tag Libraries: Utilize Liferay’s extensive API and tag libraries to leverage built-in functionalities rather than creating custom solutions from scratch.

5. Front-End Development: Follow Liferay’s front-end guidelines, including using Liferay’s front-end framework (AlloyUI or Clay, depending on the version) and responsive design principles.

6. Performance Optimization: Pay attention to performance best practices, such as efficient database interaction, caching strategies, and optimizing resource loading (JavaScript, CSS).

7. Security Best Practices: Follow security best practices like input validation, proper authentication and authorization, and secure communication (HTTPS).

8. Effective Use of Liferay Hooks: Use Liferay hooks for customizing Liferay’s default behavior instead of modifying Liferay’s core files directly.

9. Testing and Quality Assurance: Implement comprehensive testing, including unit tests, integration tests, and functional tests. Liferay’s testing framework should be used for this purpose.

10. Deployment and Versioning: Use tools like Git for source control and Maven or Gradle for dependency management and build processes. Follow semantic versioning for your modules.

11. Liferay Upgrades: Regularly update your Liferay installation to the latest version to benefit from security updates, bug fixes, and new features.

12. Documentation and Code Comments: Maintain thorough documentation and code comments for future reference and easier maintenance.

13. Logging and Monitoring: Implement proper logging and monitoring for easier troubleshooting and performance tracking.

14. Community Involvement: Engage with the Liferay community through forums, blogs, and events to stay updated with the latest practices and solutions.

Following these practices ensures that your Liferay projects are robust, maintainable, scalable, and secure. These practices are in line with general best practices in software development but are tailored to fit the Liferay ecosystem.

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Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

What you should not be doing in Liferay – Part 1

Here is a list of what you should not be doing in Liferay – Part 1 and also what you should be doing written right next to it in place of the wrong things:

  • Write JDBC calls in portlets. Avoid JDBC calls in portlets. Please explore expando, service builder, dynamic queries and such from Liferay.
  • Run elasticsearch & database in embedded mode in production. This is to be avoided always. For production and especially clustering, use remote elasticsearch and separate database.
  • Use simple filestore for large number of documents. Right from the start prefer using advanced filestore.
  • Forget to switch off developer settings in portal-ext.properties and verbose level of tracing in logs. Please switch off developer settings and verbose level tracing in logs.
  • No performance testing and tuning of system before go-live. Please perform performance testing and tuning including GC / JVM / Caching / etc. for Liferay. Install Glowroot right from the start if possible in central pattern.
  • Not configure security for various parts of the system. Configure SSL, xpack security for search. Explore the security page on Liferay Learn for various configurations. Perform VAPT at the start.
  • Not enabling SSO. If SSO will be required in future, please enable it right from the start so that there are no user problems later. Also, it helps to reduce load on Liferay CPU of encryption.
  • Not refer official documentation. Please refer liferay.dev – forums, blogs, learn.liferay.comhelp.liferay.com, help center articles, Liferay Learn YouTube channel and more from the start.
  • Not explore commerce, objects, publications, headless APIs, blueprints, asset library, fragments and such features. Please explore all this right from the start.
  • Not explore benchmarking, performance, compatibility matrix whitepapers. Please explore them before go-live. There are lot of resources under resources section on Liferay.com including case studies, whitepapers and more.
  • Not create go-live, integration, deployment diagram, architecture and such documents at the start. Please create go-live, integration, deployment, architecture, design documents from the start.
  • Check Glowroot only when you face a problem. Instead, check your Glowroot regularly on weekly basis at least.
  • Not size the infrastructure requirements for NAS/SAN for filestore and DR strategy. Please plan your infrastructure requirements in terms of NAS/SAN, servers for Liferay, database, elastic and others like web server before go-live.
  • Not doing regular maintenance. Routinely do maintenance of Liferay, database, Elasticsearch, webserver and more by checking logs, JVM, CPU/memory usage, configurations and more.
  • Not checking your lighthouse score incase of public websites. Regularly optimize your lighthouse score incase of public facing websites.
  • Not have a DevSecOps strategy in place. Please create a CICD pipeline, DevSecOps strategy and implementation with Git style repository to manage things properly.
  • Not have an upgrade plan mapped to quarterly release of Liferay. Please have an upgrade plan mapped to quarterly releases of Liferay.

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

Liferay best practices – Part 1

Developers and managers both struggle at times to pre-plan usage of best practices in projects causing many problems which are best avoided. Providing below some learnings & best practices on using and working with Liferay – Part 1.

  • Don’t work directly on the Liferay database. Use the groovy script console in CONTROL PANEL or the Liferay User Interface. Use the database at the max as a READ ONLY tool for analysis and debugging – even this is for extreme cases when recommended like for problems in reindexing and such for BackgroundTaskTable or Lock_ as per Help Center articles only. Stick to Liferay APIs (REST or Java / Groovy – based) for right results. Changing anything at database level can have unintended consequences which are best avoided.
  • If you need a cloud offering, instead of deploying Liferay on AWS / GCP / Azure or similar on your own which can be a valid option, also consider and evaluate one of Liferay DXP Self Hosted, Liferay Experience Cloud Self-Managed or Liferay Experience Cloud. They are built on top of GCP with many advanced features pre-baked like CI/CD depending on the version you select. Liferay’s cloud offering decrease many of the efforts of upgrades, infrastructure, security, patches, CI/CD, monitoring and more depending on which option you select.
  • Use as many out of the box features as possible, followed by configuration and lastly customization. There are 100s and 1000s of direct and indirect features for Liferay available on it’s documentation site.
  • Support tickets are for Liferay product issues, reach out to Customer Success for short term engagements up to multi-month configuration, system administration, customization, audits and such areas. Global services is for executing projects, SME engagements to embed a Liferay expert into your team for technical help, team augmentation, custom packages to support upgrades, performance tuning, DevOps/Architecture kickstarts, long- and short-term customization development, etc. on Liferay. Reaching out to the right team maximizes chances of a fast resolution for your request. For support issues, refer this blog: https://liferay.dev/blogs/-/blogs/working-with-liferay-support
  • Maintain a DevOps / DevSecOps / Repository strategy. Use best practices of code merging, quality and more.
  • Maintain a list of customizations, custom APIs (REST) and modules that are deployed.
  • Consider headless if you want extreme performance or a very specific User Interface with a non standard JS library or you want to connect with an external app with Liferay as the engine or want a very high LightHouse score. Even without headless high scores are possible in most areas.
  • Understand LightHouse and PageSpeed Insights score. There are many hidden things which are NOT OBVIOUS – for example mobile performance scores. Consider investing in parallel into an in-house monitoring tool as well.
  • Upgrades need preparation and multiple dry runs. Bad data, orphan data and bad customizations create problems in upgrade. So use Liferay in the optimum way as per documentation.
  • Keep regular watch on End of Life support and premium / extended support phases. Pre-plan your upgrades by at least one+ years.
  • Lift and shift from in-prem to cloud is not a healthy approach using AMIs. Consider setting up Liferay again via backups if you are shifting to AWS/GCP/Azure from in-prem. Otherwise consider Liferay Experience Cloud, migration would still be needed though.
  • Search & database server should be monitored and optimized on routine basis.
  • Search optimization needs to be a regular habit by the Liferay Administrator as the content and documents get updated. Explore concepts like suggestions, boosting, queries, filters, blueprints and more.
  • SSO, Authentication, Authorization, Login and Security need advance planning and design. These topics vary widely from customer to customer.
  • There are many inbuilt apps in areas of collaboration, social, workflow, content, process, documents and more. Explore and use them before doing customizations.
  • Explore Liferay marketplace for technical & functional accelerators / solutions before investing in developing from scratch.
  • Maintain documentation for your architecture, design, customizations, testing, security, code quality and other areas.
  • Understand and study portal & system properties, they have many settings which can help in managing various scenarios directly by configuration only.
  • Explore Liferay University and trainings on it.
  • Clustered environments are possible in Liferay and consider planning for them right during your architecture, design phase at the start of project rather than later.
  • Consider usage of Advanced or S3 filestore, Clustering, Headless, Liferay DevStudio, Docker images of Liferay, Virtual instances and similar advanced concepts as need be from early in the project.
  • Understand Liferay architecture, tooling and internals like Portlets, OSGi, Liferay DevStudio, Configurations, Control Panel, Gogo Shell, Module projects, Dependencies, Modularity and such.
  • Your important directories and areas in Liferay are: Liferay Home and sub-directories, Filestore / document library – data folder, Custom modules, Configuration files in Liferay Home sub/directories, Search server, Control Panel, Database, Other peripheral configuration areas like load balancer, application server, networking, clustered environments and such.
  • Learn to use the Liferay forums, Liferay Blogs, Liferay GitHub, Liferay Help Center, Liferay Community site, Customer & Partner portals of Liferay well. Lot of useful information is available there.
  • There are in-built areas in the same integrated DXP installation from 7.4 onwards for Digital experience, Portal, Commerce with Analytics. Consider using them from DXP platform before doing customizations for features that are available already.
  • Explore concepts like debug patch, logging per module and overall logging in Liferay.
  • Reach out to community slack channel which can be a great way to further connect with Liferay resources.
  • Keep your portal & components updated with relevant patches & upgrades as per advisory from Liferay.
  • Refer Liferay resources page with case studies & whitepapers. It has useful information on cloud migration, compatibility matrix, benchmarking, what customers are doing with Liferay and more.

References:

  • https://help.liferay.com/hc/en-us
  • https://liferay.dev/
  • https://learn.liferay.com/dxp/latest/en/liferay-internals.html
  • https://learn.liferay.com/dxp/latest/en/index.html
  • https://help.liferay.com/hc/en-us/categories/5843406636941
  • https://marketplace.liferay.com/
  • https://www.liferay.com/liferay-experience-cloud
  • https://learn.liferay.com/dxp-cloud/latest/en/index.html
  • https://www.liferay.com/resources/case-studies
  • https://www.liferay.com/resources

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in