Control Panel functions

The Liferay Portal Control Panel, available from the Dock, contains several tools for system administrators and power users.

The left menu is grouped into sections, each containing a number of user and administrator tool components. Each section can be expanded or collapsed.

Control Panel - initial view

User name section

This is the logged-in user's personal space, which contains the following functions:
My Account Allows you to edit your user information, including changing your password.
My Pages Allows you to edit your public and private pages.

Latitude section

Power users most commonly use the Control Panel to get access to these administrative components:
Data Sources Used to view and reload data sources.
Data Source Bindings Used to associate data sources with components.
Attribute Settings Used to create and modify attribute groups, and configure attributes.
Framework Settings Provides access to state, security, and other settings.
Performance Metrics Displays information about component and MDEX Engine query performance.
About Latitude Studio Provides build and version information for Latitude Studio.

Portal section

The Portal section is intended for portal administrators to manage the user community. The administrative components in this section are:
Users Used to add and modify user accounts.
Organizations Used to create and edit Organizations, which are hierarchical collections of users.
Communities Used to create and edit Communities, which are collections of users who have a common interest.
User Groups Used to create and edit User Groups, which are simple, arbitrary collections of users.
Roles Used to manage user roles, which are used to define permissions across their scope. The types of roles are:
  • Portal role - grants access across the portal.
  • Community role - grants access only within a single Community.
  • Organization role - grants access only within a single Organization.
The portal administrator can use these roles to control permissions in the application, such as who is able to see specific pages.
Password Policies Sets the password rules, such as the password strength and the password expiration.
Settings Contains most of the global portal settings, including authentication, e-mail configuration, and the default landing page.
Monitoring If monitoring is enabled, monitors all the live sessions in the portal.
Plugins Configuration Used to configure which portal roles have access to the plugins.

Server section

Server Administration Allows you to perform administrative tasks for the overall portal server, including:
  • Resource management
  • Setting log levels
  • Migrating data between databases
  • Configuring the e-mail server
  • Shutting down the Liferay Portal server
Portal Instances Allows you to add and configure multiple portal instances on a single server.
Plugins Installation Allows you to view the installed plugins and add new ones.

Layout Control section

Web Content Allows you to add Web content, structures, templates, and RSS feeds.
Links Allows you to add folder links.