Themes & Layout Tutorial

Copyright © 2000-2006 Liferay, Inc.

All Rights Reserved.
No material may be reproduced electronically or in print without written
permission from Liferay, Inc.
 Objectives
1. Customize your own Liferay Theme
a. Introduction to Liferay Themes
b. Deploy a Liferay Theme
c. Modify example theme
2. Customize your own Liferay Layout
a. Create a custom 2-3 layout
- (2-3 = 2 column row on top of a 3 column row)
b. Select different layout templates
 Introduction to Liferay Themes
With themes, you can quickly & completely
redesign a website layout with a single war file.

Lets see some examples:

- Themes from Liferay Website:
- Liferay.com -> downloads -> community themes
 Exercise 1
Change the Liferay Theme
a. Startup Tomcat
b. On the Liferay website
“Page Settings” -> “Look and Feel” -> Select Theme
 Portal
• Creating a theme can be a very time consuming
process, depending on what exactly needs to be done.

• Step 1: Identify the major components

Most themes contain the following elements:

• Banner
• Navigation
• Portlet area

• Some themes that are more graphically intensive also have a top,
bottom, and left and right sides.
Identify the major components
Identify the major components
Identify the major components
 Portlets
• Step 2: Identify the portlet areas

– The next step is to identify your portlet areas.

All portlets are composed of 12 pieces.
• Look for all 12 pieces /
images of the portlet

• Notice that some

portlets have wide
borders and some
have thin, it all
depends on how your
portlet is supposed to
look

• If there are shadows

you need to
incorporate the entire
shadow in your image.
 Exercise 2
Deploy your own “example.war” theme
and change Liferay’s homepage to
use that theme.

This theme will help distinguish each of

the pieces of the theme to give you
practice in editing themes.

Deploying your theme:

1. Startup Tomcat (if not already)
2. Copy “example.war” to your themes folder:
C:\Projects\Training\ext\themes\example.war
3. “ant deploy” from your themes folder
4. Reload the page and select this theme
 Step 3: Putting it all together
Portlet Area
You will need to cut your portlets up into 12 images like shown above, then populate the 12 portlet areas based on the
images you cut up (set the height, width, and file name of each images)

Hint: look for these lines

css_cached.vm:
ext\themes\example.war\html\themes\example\templates\css_cached.vm

– .portlet-header-bar-middle
– .portlet-header-bar-right
– .portlet-header-bar-left
– .portlet-corner-ul
– .portlet-corner-ur
– .portlet-corner-br
– .portlet-corner-bl
– .portlet-border-top
– .portlet-border-left
– .portlet-border-right
– .portlet-border-bottom
 Banner
To build the banner you need to edit:
css_cached.vm:
ext\themes\example.war\html\themes\example\templates\css_cached.vm

• .layout-banner-left
• .layout-banner-middle
• .layout-banner-right
Usually only the middle is required, but if the theme needs to stretch along the
x axis you will need left and right as well.
 Top, Bottom, Left, Right
Top and Bottom Decorations
css_cached.vm:
ext\themes\example.war\html\themes\example\templates\css_cached.vm

– #layout-top-decoration
– #layout-corner-ul
– #layout-corner-ur
– #layout-bottom-decoration
– #layout-corner-bl
– #layout-corner-br

Use these to build your top and bottom decorations

Left and Right Sides

css_cached.vm:
ext\themes\example.war\html\themes\example\templates\css_cached.vm

– #layout-box-left
– #layout-box-right

Look for these to edit the sides

 Exercise 3
Modify the example.war theme to look like the one below
• Helpful Notes:
– border-left: 1px dotted black;
– In Firefox’s web developer extensions press (CTRL-SHFT-F) for helpful HTML info

• Files to modify:
– ext\themes\example.war\html\themes\example\templates\
• css_cached.vm (css)
• portal_normal.vm (layout)
– ext\themes\example.war\WEB-INF
• liferay-look-and-feel.xml ($colorScheme)
 Content and Layout
• Why new layouts?
– Variety is good
– Not all sites are the same
– Sometimes the defaults just don’t work for
your needs
• How do we do it?
– Layouttpl (Layout Template)
• 4.0.0 makes this process so much easier!
 Prepare the layouts folder
• In the EXT directory navigate to the layouttpl folder

• Create a folder called sample.war here

> ext\layouttpl\sample.war
• In sample.war, create two folders: WEB-INF and html
> ext\layouttpl\sample.war\WEB-INF
> ext\layouttpl\sample.war\html
• We have now setup the basic folder structure for layouts.
This is the process that must always be followed for new
layouts
 Preparing supporting files
• Inside the WEB-INF folder that was just created, create a
file and name it liferay-layout-templates.xml
> ext\layouttpl\sample.war\WEB-INF\
liferay-layout-templates.xml

• Now create one more file here, and call it web.xml

> ext\layouttpl\sample.war\WEB-INF\
web.xml
 liferay-layout-templates.xml
liferay-layout-templates.xml
ext\layouttpl\sample.war\WEB-INF\liferay-layout-templates.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE layout-templates PUBLIC "-//Liferay//DTD Layout Templates 4.0.0//EN"
"http://www.liferay.com/dtd/liferay-layout-templates_4_0_0.dtd">

<layout-templates>
<custom>
<layout-template id="training" name="training">
<template-path>/html/layouttpl/custom/training.tpl</template-path>
</layout-template>
</custom>
</layout-templates>
 What did that do?
• Layout-templates is our root element, it tells Liferay that
we are defining new layouts

• Custom tells Liferay that this is not a built in template,

but something new

• Layout-template-id and name let Liferay know what to

– Display in add content
– Set as the unique id for this template

• Template-path tells Liferay where to find the template

structure (tpl) file
 web.xml
web.xml
ext\layouttpl\sample.war\WEB-INF\web.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE web-app PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application
2.3//EN" "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd">

<web-app>
<display-name>sample</display-name>
<listener>
<listener-
class>com.liferay.portal.kernel.servlet.LayoutTemplateContextListener</listener
-class>
</listener>
</web-app>
 Preparing the tpl file
• In ext\layouttpl\sample.war\html,
– create a “layouttpl” folder:
• Inside layouttpl,
– create a “custom” folder:
• Inside custom,
– create the file “training.tpl”

• ext\layouttpl\sample.war\html\layouttpl\custom\training.tpl
 2-3 column layout code
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%">
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="45%">$processor.processColumn("column-1")</td>
<td width="10%">&nbsp;</td>
<td valign="top" width="45%">$processor.processColumn("column-2")</td>
</tr>
</table>

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%">

<tr>
<td valign="top" width="30%">$processor.processColumn("column-3")</td>
<td width="5%">&nbsp;</td>
<td valign="top" width="30%">$processor.processColumn("column-4")</td>
<td width="5%">&nbsp;</td>
<td valign="top" width="30%">$processor.processColumn("column-5")</td>
</tr>
</table>
 Deploy Layouts
• Navigate to ext/layouttpl
• Run ant deploy
• Open a web browser to http://localhost
• Login
• For this example, let’s create a new page
 Let’s add content!
• Click Add Content

• Select your Layout Template

• Click test and add (portlets with small width):

• Hello Laszlo
• Hello Velocity
• Hello World
• Your sample portlet
 Finish it
• Refresh your page

• Drag all the portlets around to fill the five

columns
 Summary
• You should now know:
– How to create a basic theme
– How to create custom layouts
– How to add new content pages
– How to use change the layout template
• Things to practice
– The more CSS and HTML you know, the
better off you will be
– Getting a theme just right takes time. Don’t
lose faith, it is possible!
 Congratulations!
Congratulations! You’ve just modified your own theme!

Login: test@liferay.com
Password: test

To hot deploy JSR-168 compliant portlets, Liferay layout templates, or

Liferay themes just drop your *.war files in C:/home/liferay/deploy
Sample portlets can be found here:
http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/downloads/samples
For more information on hot deploy, click here:
http://content.liferay.com/4.0.0/docs/developers/ch06s01.html
 Revision History
Scott Lee 11/2/2006
- Created & Updated slides from Brett’s Theme Docs & Layout Ppt

Scott Lee 11/10/2006

- Fixed typos (Liferay-layout-templates.xml, tpl filepath)
- added “helpful notes” for excercise