New to Liferay 6.0

I have only recently started using Lifera开发者_开发技巧y 6.0. I have downloaded liferay-portal-tomcat-6.0.4_1 community edition.

First of all can you please recommend me some website and books or articles for Liferay 6.0? (The ones available on the Internet are for earlier versions...)

Secondly. I don' t seem to get the structure of Liferay. For example, how do organisation, communities, users, pages all fit in together?

Lastly, could you tell me how I could make a link on a page to point to a directory on the file system at the local machine of the user?

Thanks.

To work through Liferay internals is really tough but it's not impossible. There's no main source of documentation and people has to google around and forget things very easily without possibility to get back to the original source...

Organizations can form hierarchies as real organizations would. Communities has similar role as organizations but from a different point of view.
The main difference consists in :

persistence - persists in time in contrast to communities which appears and disappears

administration - users “belong” to an organization which means that the the admin of an organization is able to edit his profile. On the other hand users “join” a community which means that the community admin can only manage the membership.

Relationship - organizations can form a hierarchy while communities are independent of each other

membership - users “must” belong to an organization while joining a community is optional

User groups - Unlike organizations and locations, user groups have no context associated with them. They are purely a convenience grouping that aids administrators in assigning permissions and roles to a group of users instead of individual users or assigning a group of users to a community.

Roles define permissions across the portal, an organization or across a community. There are functions like creation of a thread in a discussion forum. Problem is that there are forums across scopes like community, organization or the entire portal. So that portal role grants access to creation of a new thread in each and every discussion forum and community role just within a particular community.

I'm also a Liferay newbie but here's the general structure of Liferay in case someone is interested.

• Organizations are a portal administrator mandated hierarchy. Organizations may have sub organizations that are administered by organization administrators in each organization. Each organization can have it's own pages.

• Communities are like organizations but can't have sub communities and non-administrator users may be allowed to create them. Each community can have it's own pages.

• Users are registered users who may have their own pages and may belong to any number of organizations and/or communities.

• Pages are web pages that users with certain permissions can edit simply by selecting a predefined layout and adding/removing portlets and sub-pages.

• Portlet is a web application that usually "runs" as part of a page in it's own window like container.

can you please recommend me some website and books or articles for Liferay 6.0?

Our liferay tag is a good place to start with. It contains all the relevant information about some useful websites and also some good books suggestion. And it is continually being updated.

I don' t seem to get the structure of Liferay. For example, how do organisation, communities, users, pages all fit in together?

Unlike for previous versions, the user-guide is really a good place to know some basic administration concepts like these.

could you tell me how I could make a link on a page to point to a directory on the file system at the local machine of the user?

I don't know exactly what you want or what is the requirement to do this, but giving <input type="file" /> would open the file browser to select a file or else you can use flash to achieve this or construct a link like <a href="file:///C:/">Click to pen local folder</a> - but this only works for windows and it opens the folder structure inside the browser itself and with IE it opens the Windows explorer.

Now, you can access Liferay documentation to learn more about liferay. Starting from v6.1 there are no communities. Now it has organizations and sites.

As far as I know, currently there is only one book for Liferay 6, from Jonas Yuan:

http://www.liferay.com/web/jonas.yuan/blog/-/blogs/liferay-book:-liferay-portal-6-enterprise-intranets