Monday, April 09, 2007

Back to Life(ray) - 01

I really can't believe its been so long since I put something here!!! Anyway the charity is still getting over the loss of Jon Pritchard, we are still getting over the loss of our cats, and I am still puzzling about how & when to bring MediBlog to life. And I got loads more management responsibilities at work; all of which makes it tough to get the time & motivation to do anything.

I may be repeating myself here but just in case I haven't already mentioned it: getting the hrtrust.org installation/upgrade of liferay 4.2 was painful. In the end I had to admit defeat and get the experts in and paid Liferay for one day's consultancy to install it. There is an important lesson here for anyone who just wants a portal but doesn't know how to do it! Essentially, the excellent people at Rimu Hosting do offer a great Liferay hosting service (no really, its great) but they are not Liferay consultants. Hence when the basic installation doesn't work you really can't expect them to fix everything so:

Open Source Portals:

1. If you want the best open source portal, choose Liferay
2. ...but its Java so its not easy or cheap to host it (compared to PHP platforms)
3. If you can't host it yourself use Rimuhosting, as advertised on the Liferay site
4. Buy as much resource as you can afford on the Rimu VPS
5. If you're not a java/opensource guru, forget trying to install it yourself; expect to pay a Liferay consultant at least ONE DAY to do it for you

Then you will have the basic installation of Liferay and have established some kind of relationship with the nice people who work there.

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