Discovering Liferay

I just discovered Liferay, an open source portal, after reading David Fletcher's discussion of Portal Architectures on his blog. Although I have seen and evaluated PHP Website", I haven't seen see Liferay, which is equally -- perhaps more -- impressive.

2 minute read

December 12, 2004, 10:08 PM PST

By Chris Steins @planetizen


Liferay thumbI just discovered Liferay, an open source portal, after reading David Fletcher's discussion of Portal Architectures on his blog.



Although I have seen and evaluated PHP Website", I haven't seen see Liferay, which is equally -- perhaps more -- impressive.



I signed up for the demo site, and was greatly impressed by the elegant interface, modular architecture, and existing functionality.



I'm also always impressed by companies -- life Liferay -- that build a successful business around open source software.



Follow-up: Shortly after this post appeared Jordan Anderson, a Master of Urban Planning candidate at New York University emailed to comment on my post, and related CMSes:


I've been reading your Planetizen TechTalk posts on using open source content management systems as platforms for local government information sharing. As a current urban planning student and former technology professional, I share your enthusiasm and wanted to mention I've been very happy with the PostNuke system and community.

Early this year, I used PostNuke to centralize information about Helena, Montana's downtown redevelopment. For my capstone/thesis, I'm working on a more ambitious project (requiring serious PostNuke hacking) to put together a portal for urban planning information in New York. Read about it on my project blog, and in a short overview document [360K PDF].



And you probably know about the e-democracy-oriented CMS, CivicSpace--a Drupal variant.





Thanks for the wealth of information, Jordan!



Chris Steins

Chris Stines is Planetizen's former Editor and the founder of Urban Insight, a leading digital agency. Chris has 25 years of experience in technology consulting and urban planning and has served as a consultant to public sector state, county, and local agencies, Fortune 500 private firms, educational institutions, and nonprofit organizations.

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