Navigating Liferay

As we now have some basic information about a portal, let's learn how to navigate Liferay Portal. Start your server, if it is not started already.

You will see the Tomcat console and different processes running on the console when starting the server. Notice the messages on the console and try to find out the database used by the Liferay default bundle. When the server is started, you will get a message on your console that Server has started in XXXX ms. Open a browser and type in http://localhost:8080/web/guest/home.

As you will notice, you can still access the page with a very simple interface even though you are not logged in. This is because you are accessing a public page of Liferay. A public page can be accessed by anyone, including non-logged in (guest) users.

You will see a link—Sign In—on the top-right corner of the page. Click on this link to log in to Liferay. When you click on the link it will display a Sign In portlet as displayed in the following screenshot. You can use this portlet to provide you with the credentials to log in to Liferay Portal. You can also create a new user account or request a new password, if you have forgotten your password. Liferay also supports logging in using an OpenID account, if you already have one. The next chapter explains how to configure the OpenID.

If you create a new account using this portlet, that account will have very limited access to the portal. This means you cannot access Liferay admin functions using this account. We will not create a new account at this moment. We will use Liferay's default admin credentials.