A few nights ago, with heart in mouth, I installed Liferay, the widely acclaimed open source portal, on my laptop. This is not any old laptop. It’s my trusty Mac, configured jut so – in particular as an Apache server (localhost only) using MAMP. I know enough about Liferay to know it doesn’t run on standard Apache, but rather Apache Tomcat. And while I love the name (memories of the many marvelous male cats dancing through my mind) about all I know about Tomcat is it’s Java based. So I also had visions of Liferay blowing up my machine.

Why run this kind of risk? I could claim being game for any popular open source technology, and while I wish this were the case, who has that kind of time? No. It’s because of a work project I’m part of. A group needs an online collaboration tool, including document sharing. More to the point, they need it quickly. Drupal (as of version 6) is weak at document sharing, though strong on some of the group’s other needs. Several of my IT colleagues know and like Liferay, and think it may be a good match for document sharing. They tell me it’s a competitor to SharePoint. So we’re off an adventure — exploring whether to use it, Drupal or a combination.

Basic Instructions

My laptop survived. In fact, it turned out there’s a very simple way to do this. I used the BitNami Liferay Stack for OSX 10.4 or later. I considered doing it from scratch, but my eyes started to cross reading the documentation, plus I don’t aspire to be a Liferay expert.

If you’re considering doing this too, the only caution is to be sure your MAMP (or other server setup) is running on a port other than 8080 – the port Liferay will use. MAMP defaults to 8888, so if you haven’t changed that, it should be straightforward.

The result? A cool new technology on my laptop in just a few minutes. While I’m digging into Liferay in more of a stakeholder mode, setting up pages and “applications” like a software hussy, I’m also exploring how to change its themes. It looks fairly straightforward for someone who has dealt with Drupal or Wordpress themes.

One final tip: the themes in a BitNami installation will be buried deep in the following directory:
[your liferay folder] > apache-tomcat > webapps > liferay > html > themes

Enjoy.