In this post I will show you how you can SEO optimize your Liferay portlets. When you are building a portal which is (partially) available to the general public you want the search engines to rank your portal as high as possible in order to draw as much traffic to your portal as possible. Because of the nature of a portal (a ‘empty’ canvas filled with several unrelated portlets) it’s pages aren’t ideal for search engines because it hasn’t got a SEO description and keywords (or even a SEO friendly title).

In this post I will show you how you can in use build in features of Liferay to optimize SEO, First we will discus what you can do on a portal level and then I will show you how you can optimize SEO directly from a portlet itself.
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Today is the second day of the Liferay development course in Frankfurt. Looking through the window gives me hope that the weather will be a bit better than yesterday. Yesterday we spend most of the day setting up Liferay for development and building a basic portlet.

Today we will cover how to use advanced portlet features like JSR-286 eventing, how to set up a portlet using struts and how to create a service using the service builder. I am particularly looking forward to that last part because it allows you to add additional services to Liferay.

Anyway, enough material to blog about so please stay tuned (while I get some breakfast ).

This morning was devoted to setting up a Liferay development environment. Not too much new stuff for me but I got the change to figure out some small things which will probably be useful in the future.

After a pleasant lunch we are ready to write some code!

The weather in Frankfurt is much like the weather in Holland: rainy.

Today and the next 2 days I am going to increase my Liferay development skills in the city of Frankfurt. It is an official training by Liferay inc. I flew in Yesterday with my colleague Jeroen. I am writing this post from the class just like in the good old school days . There are about 20 other developers in this 3 day training.

I am really looking forward to learn some new tricks. I will keep you posted!

From the comfort of my own home, this is Bert Willems reporting on the Liferay and the future of portal development. I haven’t dreamed it up: this is a report of a Liferay webinar I just attended. Paul Hinz, Chief Marketing Officer of Liferay, Inc hosted the webinar. He talked about the role of open source software in enterprise as well as the vision Liferay has about the future of web, portal and social collaboration technologies.

He explained why a lot of things which portals have promised are actually unmet by today’s portals. Most notably is that portal development using the portlet API is hard when compared to develop decentralized applications in for example PHP or Ruby. The learning curve of Java and it’s technology stack is considerably longer compared to other web application frameworks. Due to this fact other frameworks made their way into the enterprise.

He then elaborated on the evolved focus of portals and other web applications: providing a centralized platform for end user to create, share and develop knowledge. This is not something new because it is all around us already. Take a look at LinkedIn for example: I can add this very WordPress blog to my LinkedIn profile and the same goes for my Twitter account; LinkedIn acts as a portal.

Paul envisions that users will developing applications and share them in the same way the develop content together now in the Wikipedia. The focus of technology providers like Liferay will be on facilitating these user developers. A good example here is Apples iPhone with its countless available user build applications.

The focus of the Liferay development team for 2010 is:

• Content Management Interoperability Services & integration of 3rd party content repositories
• User defined workflow & business processes
• Stronger personalization and enhanced collaboration tools
• Faceted search & other search improvements

Notice to focus on facilitation and easy of extension rather then providing new features.

This is, in my humble opinion, a positive paradigm shift from classic wisdom owners (fortune 500 companies, patent holders, publishers, standards committees etc.) to wisdom of the crowd. Why shouldn’t we use the collective knowledge in all of our minds and combine it in a productive way so we can solve problems together? I see this shift in the software development world (see the microformats opposed to standardization committees like W3C and JCP) for example but also in the publishing industry (Wikipedia anyone?). There is a lot more to say about this subject but I will save that for a later post. Bye for now.

Welcome to the second article in a series of articles on Liferay. In this series I will show you various aspects of Liferay, Liferay installation, Liferay maintenance and Liferay development so lets get started. These articles assume that you have basic Java development skills.

In this post I will show you how to configure Liferay to use MySQL instead of Hypersonic. I assume you have followed all the steps in the previous post or that you are using a JNDI datasource. I also assume that you have installed MySQL on your system already. If not, please install it first. If the portal is still running stop it first before continuing with the next steps.

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Welcome to the first article in a series of articles on Liferay. In this series I will show you various aspects of Liferay, Liferay installation, Liferay maintenance and Liferay development so lets get started. These articles assume that you have basic Java development skills.

In this post I will show you how to install Liferay 5.2.3, the latest communitie edition, on your local machine in the JBoss 5.1 application server, I assume you have a Windows machine. If you are running a different OS you can take the same steps but some paths will change depending on your OS. There are quite a few steps that need to be taken in order to set up Liferay, I will go through each and every step in detail. Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow I have my annual planning meeting with my manager. In this meeting we will discus my targets for 2010 as well as the long term goals. I always enjoy these meetings because if forces me to think about and to plan my future. Before I can see where I want to go, I have to figure out who I am now. So lets give it a try:

I am a 24 year old technical lead developer with a strong passion for software architecture and development. I am an expert on the .NET platform, expercienced in desktop and web application development and familiar with most frameworks like WCF, WPF, Castle Project, NHibernate and Lucene.NET. I am able to make technical designs using UML and apply the appropiate design and architectural patterns.

As a team lead I can start, manage and finish several project simultaneously using both inhouse and outsourced teams. I understand the business problem my customer have and advise them on solutions, do requirments analysis and make accurate estimations.

I think this is a pretty accurate description of who I am (professionally). I will let you know where I want to go tomorrow because it is time for a glass of wine and some frisian clove cheese!

Today i got myself a new cellphone: a BlackBerry Bold 9700. I am really happy with it because it works so much better than my old phone. Everything works like it is supposed to.

Then i discovered an app which connects to WordPress! Brilliant! I wrote this post on it.

Going back to do something usefull now (making dinner).

A beautiful song. I have spend a full day listening to this amazin song and I am still not bored with it and I want to share it with you, enjoy!