User generated content with liferay -for anonymous users (part 1)

If you are creating a "Web 2.0" site you might want to allow the users to generate content by themselves. Unfortunately there is no real "out of the box" support for this by liferay -except the discussion forum, which is way to limited in it's functionalitites or better: flexibility.

So to achieve this functionality lets first define the requirements a bit further:

1. User shall be able to create content (entries)
   
2. It shall be possible to comment and rate these entries
3. It shall be possible to display the content in various ways (aggregated, isolated, pre-view,..)
4. The entries should be stored search engine friendly
5. Optimized for external users and internet (simple + user friendly, captcha support, evtl key word/html code blocking,...)
   

From my perspective there are three ways to achieve this:

1. Complete custom coding
2. Use API: Page, Journal articles, page comments, ...
3. Use API: Blog

As I chose to use liferay to use a lot out of the box functionalties and not to do everything on my own (especially to be able to benefit from ongoing updates and improvements) I chose to go for option 2 or 3.

As 3 seemed to be easier and more comprehensive I chose to go for that option first...

Regarding the requirements:
There are still a lot of open questions which I will address in the following posts - but one thing already: Requirement 5 (simplicity, captcha, etc.) is of course not very much build in for guest.

So I will do that for my own based on JSF-portlets. Details on this will also come in the next posts. To give you an impression how my "API-wrapper" looks like - see the screenshot above