Question

Hello I would like to start developing a lifeRay theme and am a little bit lost!

I am a Mac user and i have installed liferay and also Xcode but i am not clear how to begin.

I have downloaded the SDK for liferay but i do not understand how to install it or use it for that matter, so questions:

Is Xcode an appropriate development environment to work with or is something else a little easier to get on with?

Does Xcode build in the same way ANT does?

How do i install the SDK? Do i just drop it into Tomcat and away i go?

Yes i am very new to all this!! I am not actually sure if i am asking the right questions

Answer 1

I just responded to a similar question (more detail on the theme part) …. basically, you need to use the terminal to use most of the SDK functionality.

if you’re just developing a theme, you’ll need to have the sdk and one of the server bundles downloaded. put them in the same folder so you end up with something like

liferay/

liferay/tomcat (holding the tomcat bundle)

liferay/plugins (holding the plugin sdk)

liferay/deploy

then configure the .properties file …. create a file in the plugins folder and name it

build.[YOURNAME].properties ….

run this in the terminal window … note the backtics aren’t apos.

touch build.`whoami`.properties

edit the file and add these lines …

app.server.dir=${project.dir}/../tomcat
auto.deploy.dir=${project.dir}/../deploy

then in the tomcat folder edit

tomcat/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/portal-ext.properties

and edit / add the following line

 resource.repositories.root=/path/to/liferay
 auto.deploy.dest.dir=/path/to/liferay/deploy

…. to start the server change to the main folder and enter

tomcat/bin/startup.sh

you can watch the server’s log by typing

tail -f tomcat/logs/catalina.out

Check my other post for all the CSS and THEME stuff ….

Need to change template styles in Liferay