Migrating to Liferay: pitfalls and lifeboats

Making business is not obscure as that mystery mechanism that calls birds to return home in spring.

The bird migrations keep flashing scientists minds being a phenomenon in nature. Like birds, entrepreneurs have the feeling inside when to migrate to the enterprise level. When a set of functionality depleted within the existing platform, you’ll head towards some enterprise solutions where the capacity is more plentiful.

With the extensive changes in the IT world, the customer needs are also dynamically changing. Liferay becomes a wise choice to corporate intranets and extranets portal solutions.

One of the ways to increase the effectiveness of business is to merge information and communication sources. There is something specific about a portal’s role in this matter. Liferay copes with it successfully.

When you are short a few steps away from implementing Liferay, it’s better to do pre-migration checks to ensure you are on the right way. Always some pitfalls lie in wait for you getting started. In contrast to them, lifeboats are going to carry you toward land.

Pitfalls

1. Time. It is challenging for some small but extremely growing websites to come down from WordPress, Joomla, Magento or any other CMS with tremendous patches of content. Someone must have been expected a migration fast and masterly will be done with less time-consuming. Sure, it will be. Migrating data is a complex technical process with specially created functionality for downloading and uploading as well as control and support the process of migration.

One should allow for the one-time automated migration has to be done with a little manual interference. It includes the migration of users, migration of content, migration of custom items, migration of data storage, adjustment of custom plugins, etc.

2. Stay on top. No small task is to stay top-ranged after moving to the new CMS. Redirecting URLs from the old site to the new one is a painstaking piece of migrating to the new CMS. It must have been a well-known fact that URLs generating principals differ on each CMS. In such cases, it could be handled with a use-proven redirection in Nginx and Apache without serious consequences.

You have to be aware that some changes will happen nevertheless. But a new era of Liferay is going to be open for you with new profuse possibilities which will exceed with its effect-oriented rich functionality all side actions of migration in a short space of time. It will be reported a decreased page rank in a minor way. Just be ready to face it and you will be hard to catch by surprise.

3. A hard nut to crack. First impression: Liferay is hard to work. Yes, you make up your mind to face with some challenges for the first time, but you should rely on your software provider. Experts can easily help you to grasp with settings, design, roles, permissions and the rest of functionality.

With a thought of clients in mind, we reflected on how to crack that hard nut in an appropriate way. It has resulted in a book ’50 Shades of Liferay’ which will be a windfall which leads you step by step exploring a Liferay portal. You will get through from Liferay basics to creation your first Liferay Theme, Portlet, Layout or Hook. Destined to end users and new developers this informative guide helps beginners to save time greatly and gain the understanding fast and easy.

4. Exist in harmony. It happens, a client wants to migrate from the old website to new one, and the reason is risks associated with aging of technologies at the core, limited possibilities, or a business has been undergoing changes, that will require, in its turn, a platform to be renewed.

The problem may find itself if your business is incompatible with Liferay possibilities when you have a simple e-store, corporate blog, or catalog of services. If that’s the case, Liferay can cover your needs, but you will invest to no purpose.

5. SEO URL problems. Let’s see, a well-done catalog is designed to generate the same URL for the same ‘search term’. As long as in most cases Liferay can’t guarantee the order of URL parameters, especially after submitting a form, this might be a problem (e.g., search input) only for some, not for all. It is complicated to customize URLs sometimes. But it has a solution by way of the custom development. In rare cases, it could be essential for the client.

Lifeboats

1. Enterprise-oriented. Liferay is designed to have much more modules (portlets) than your previous CMS and is used more for secure areas and Enterprise Solutions. It is a web platform assigned for business development binding different applications in one informational space. Employees will access data and share information using one application.

2. One-touch management. One instance of Liferay can support several organizations and websites. Changes could be done once and take effect everywhere on websites. This efficient feature is applied to save time for administrating, simplify the process of making alterations, and not to lose the speed of data processing.

3. Pay once, earn always. With Liferay, you get the access to Java Virtual Machine and open source enterprise solutions simultaneously. It allows gaining a high performance with no extra actions as porting or deployment to the proper environment or container, or anything.

Desired by enterprises vertical scalability is available now by means of hardware capacity at zero cost. When it comes to the reduction of downtime estimated in millions of dollars for milliseconds, this killer feature is a defining characteristic to investments in hardware.

4. Potential for upgrading. Liferay has a very tough CMS potential for upgrading. You do not need to write backend if you want to make changes. So only web content combining with structure and templates with Asset Publisher composes new components of the corporate system.

IT department is set free from a ‘zoo’ of applications focusing on administrating one server. ‘Cheaper, faster, easier’ reflects a proven slogan of Liferay CMS development.

5. Automated workflow. Liferay portal solutions are of value in the automation of a daily document routine with scores of confirmations, approvals, and history of changes. It allows being done with a mess of documents keeping a record of the various versions created, modified and assigned by different users within the hierarchical organization.

Plus, it is not necessary more to run up your documents through any side email client forward and back losing important parts of documents or time for confirmation. Your custom workflow will be brought under control running via a system of drafts, approvals, publishings, and responsible employees transferring all content with full fidelity.

Finally

Now give a sigh of relief, after Liferay is worked out in detail. Migrating to Liferay may seem not so terrible as you think if to get down to business with a great deal of energy and in a professional manner. To get a consultation with a Liferay expert for free you can here info@aimprosoft.com.