Adding or removing Liferay portlets

I had to install the Blogs portlet in Liferay.

Liferay is the all purpose portal framework that Chemtech uses to build its website.

The Liferay portal already deployed on production server is the 3.4.5 version. When I tried to add the Blogs portlet through the Add Content menu option I couldn’t find it.

Liferay Add Content Menu

Googling about Liferay’s Blogs portlet didn’t help me. The only positive clue I had was

Liferay Portal Administrator's Guide, Third Edition

(page 124) which has a section dedicated to the Blogs portlet.

I tried to understand why the Blogs portlet wasn’t available in the Add Content window:

Liferay Add Content Window No Blogs portlet available

Was it because the blogs portlet didn’t make it into the version 4.3.5 of the portal? The answer is no. The blogs portlet is available in version 4.3.5 (with limitations if compared to the Blogs portlet of today’s Liferay version that is currently 5.2.3).

After a little bit of more googling I found Development in the ext environment wiki article. I read in item 4 that you can turn portlets you want to deploy on/off by editing the file

\ext\ext-web\docroot\WEB-INF\liferay-portlet-ext.xml

Mine was located in

E:\chemsite\tomcat\webapps\lportal\WEB-INF\liferay-portlet-ext.xml

I did just that turning the Blogs portlet ON setting the <include> property to true:

<!--
    Liferay Portlets

    To create a minimal installation of Liferay so that only the essential Liferay portlets are available, uncomment the following block and set the include attribute to false for the portlets you want to remove. To make a portlet available, set the include attribute to true. The struts-path attribute is shown so that it's easier for the editor of this file to associate a portlet id with a portlet.
-->

<portlet>
          <portlet-name>33</portlet-name>
          <struts-path>blogs</struts-path>
          <include>true</include>
</portlet>

I then rerun Liferay portal using Eclipse. For my surprise I could find the Collaboration category in the Add Content window with the Blogs entry available:

Liferay Add Content Window with Blogs portlet

Hope this shortens the path when you come to need to turn a portlet on/off.