Creating a new category in Control Panel and Adding portlet in it

While development of any big portal, we need to customize control panel also. In such a case, its generally needed to make a new category in control panel and adding portlet in it. So, here are the steps, hope you'll find it helpful.

1. Override the class PortletCategoryKeys (in ext-impl\src\com\liferay\portal\util\PortletCategoryKeys.java)

     package com.liferay.portal.util;

/**

 * @author apoorva.prakash

 *

 */

public class PortletCategoryKeys {

 public static final String CONTENT = "content";

 public static final String MY = "my";

 public static final String PORTAL = "portal";

 public static final String SERVER = "server";

 public static final String MYCATEGORY = "mycategory";

 public static final String[] ALL = {MY, CONTENT, MYCATEGORY , PORTAL, SERVER};

}




Put the category in ALL array in the order you wish to appear your category.

2. Now add portlet in this category using the following entry in liferay-portlet-ext.xml file




<portlet>

    <portlet-name>portlet_id</portlet-name>

 <control-panel-entry-category>mycategory</control-panel-entry-category>

 <control-panel-entry-weight>1</control-panel-entry-weight>

</portlet>




here  portlet_id is the id of the portlet that you wish to add in our custom category. Specify the name of the category in <control-panel-entry-category> entry and sequence of portlet appearance in determined through <control-panel-entry-weight>. The higher the weight, upper will be the portlet(weight can also be in floating number).

3. Now an important point, we must enter the category name entry in language-ext.properties file, so that our category can be recognized, otherwise you'll get category name as "category.mycategory"




category.mycategory=My New Category




That's all I did, hope will work for you too.