More Liferay..

One of the nice aspects to spending all this time learning/investigating/mucking about with... the web application technologies is that I can do more for my favourite charity. Today I spent another few hours setting up the liferay portal on my local server with a view to using it for the HRTrust. Once it is installed it is quite straightforward to use, even for someone like me who generally only uses the instructions as a last resort. There are few things which were not quite so easy to understand at first, such as the relationships between Content Management System (CMS), Journals, and so on. I need to resort to the instructions I reckon, nevertheless I did get the branding and the Enterprise info sorted out (luckily one of the standard Themes is just the right colour for the trust logos and curiously fitted the colour scheme of some photos on location at the 2006 Nikolas Symposium in Corinth, Greece). I also managed to work out how to display the information I wanted for Guest and "Member" users. I've now sent a recommendation to the Board of Trustees that we implement the system and commit a budget to the hosting with the Liferay recommended hosting partner. The next step, once I get approval is to try a backup and "Disaster Recovery" to see how easy that is.

Hence, my priority for the next few weeks will probably be to get the HRTrust portal working and then focus on getting the MediBlog version up & running with a Medys portlet into next year.