The liferay wiki/forum (I don't remember which) speaks generically about extending Liferay components and, in the particulars, spoke of extending the user object specifically. However, you won't find a great deal of info explaining how to do this. Basically (at least for the 4.1 series, I haven't dug into the 4.2 series yet so the following statements might not apply) liferay is totally struts based and the user info/login is highly integrated into the portal itself. I'm sure there are good reasons for this as user login/validation is a core part of the liferay portal itself and, if handled incorrectly, could jeopardize the security of your portal implementation. Liferay has on it's list of future releases a JSF-based portal, but I don't know when they will actually release this and whether it is jsp or facelets based, how modular it will be, etc. Since they rely on spring for the integration, potentially you could identify the portion of the app managing the login, extend and override it by altering the spring bean mappings. As a recommendation, however, I'd say roll a JAAS implementation to your database (liferay already supports JAAS) as that would at least get you through the login to separate database issue. I did see that the 4.2 series seems to have CAS support so, if you have a current CAS infrastructure, this might be something you could use also. As far as the custom login interface goes, I think you'd really need to be able to justify it before endevouring on such an undertaking; trying to swap out existing portal interface elements that are struts based with a JSF-based implementation while maintaining the seamless integration of the components will most likely prove to be quite a struggle. If your only reasoning is to manage authentication via an alternate source, it is definitely more work than what it is worth. Our implementation of liferay here takes a much more simplified approach; we left the liferay authentication stuff in place, added the liferay user id to our own authentication system, and added appropriate pieces to ensure our internally-developed portlets had the necessary access to our internal authentication tokens. While it complicates user maintenance for the sys admins, it ensures that we can transparently upgrade the liferay portal w/o having to rework our internal authentication processes. For future reference, Laurentiu, you may get a better response for liferay-specific issues from the liferay forums; but, as a forum user myself, I know how frustrating it is to post questions there and see them go unanswered/unaddressed, so I certainly can't blame you for trying here also. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Laurentiu Trica Sent: Thursday, December 14, 2006 11:12 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Custom login in Liferay portal?
Hi there Can somebody help me? I have to make a custom login on Liferay portal using JSF. Does anyone has any ideas? By custom login I mean logging against another database (not Liferay's one) and without LDAP server. Found something about a custom Authenticator. Where should I place that class? I crawled the web for this and nothing came out. Thanks in advance. -- Best regards, Laurentiu
