Liferay Portal
Enterprise open-source portal framework for content management
Liferay Portal fancies itself as the world's leading enterprise open-source portal framework, and it does so by offering enterprise-level service bus and service-oriented architecture, and integrated Web publishing and content management, all while maintaining compatibility with almost all major IT infrastructure that’s currently available. It allows you to build any commerce projects with a suite of B2B and/or B2C features, from the ground up, with a wealth of customization sprinkled in.
It’s not without its flaws, though. Many of those features are either outdated or half-finished, features that started as good ideas but weren’t completely thought through or maybe just not quite finished. For basic websites, Liferay Portal has fantastic capabilities, but for more in-depth websites and projects, web content staging can break as soon as a setup becomes more complex. Again, this suite doesn’t really seem to be tailored for huge projects, though it certainly claims it is.
With a name like Gartner behind it, you might expect more. I certainly did. Database upgrades are painful when moving from one major version to the next, and patches often bundle new features together, which seem nice, but cause custom functions to fail and require total overhauls. And if you need tech support, Liferay Portal support can be agonizingly slow to respond, taking literal days to get back to you.
On the bright side, Liferay is always being improved. Unfortunately, a lot of that improvement ends up breaking things in its path, making this enterprise portal suite something to be leary of if you’re looking for a giant enterprise-level project. But if you’re only looking to make a very small, simplistic website, you can hardly do better than this. Features are intuitive, responsive, and easy to use, provided they don’t break or get updated in such a way that other features end up breaking. Unless you really know what you’re doing, though, try at your own risk.
Build a commerce project with B2B or B2C featuresFeatures:
- Full-featured web publishing
- Team-based site editing
- Role-based content discovery
- Integrates with Microsoft Office
- Social networking with analytics
Database: MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server, or PostgreSQL
Java: JDK 8 or newer
Application Server: Tomcat, JBoss, or Wildfly
PROS
Exceptional enterprise-level security measures.
Highly customizable and extendable platform.
CONS
Can be slow and resource-intensive impacting overall system performance.
Lacks robust customer support and comprehensive documentation.
