Displaying Content depending to site instance in liferay

Question

I Hope someone could help me with my problem, its related specily to knowing liferay capabilities.

Here is the work I should do: I should create a portal for my company that have multiple instances for example:

mycompany International, mycompany US, my Canada...

All the instances have common pages and some varieties for example:

About us, Contact, Descriptions...

are common pages for every instance, and each one have some specific pages us services. I don't want to duplicate the common pages.

Please show me how to manage this with liferay?

Answer 1

I'm not sure if you use generic or Liferay vocabulary in your question, there's a lot to mix and get wrong:

Liferay instances are meant to be completely disjunct of each other. They don't share any data - the only thing they share is the appserver, and with it the plugins deployed to it. What the UI calls "instance" is called "company" in the backend.

If you want to share some data, content, etc, you'll have to use distinct sites. These can share content, there's a "global" scope as well as hierarchies that you can have between sites or organizations. Organizations are hierarchical groups of users that can have sites (but don't need to).

How to manage what you ask for with Liferay is a big question - can't be answered in this scope. You don't give any clue where in the world you are, but it might make sense to start with proper training to get to know the concepts that you have in your toolbox. Granted, that's part of my job description, but I've seen so many students that were able to work around their main problems (just like yours) right after training, that I wholeheartedly can recommend going this route. It will also help you to leverage the builtin features of Liferay instead of implementing custom features by yourself - thus limiting the need to maintain custom code. That alone is typically easily paying for several trainings.

My recommendation for an introductory course is Mastering Liferay Fundamentals, which the Website still refers to as Portal Administrator (it's currently being renamed)

Edit, following your comment:

Naturally, sites are the building blocks of Liferay - you typically have the same permissions within a whole site. By default every site is presented as a separate website, but that's only the default. I've published a sample app on Liferay's Marketplace that shows an easy way to dilute this and show multiple sites instead of just one in the main navigation. Further, Liferay's AssetPublisher portlet can also fetch content from different sites in the latest version.

This way you can build and maintain multiple country specific sites, but still share content between all (or some) of them.

In the end, it still is a web application and so everything would only be a click away, but you can actually embed the content easily on each and every site if you wish so.