Liferay Plugin-SDK Details

Plugin-SDK comes into picture after Liferay 4.X version.
Liferay introduced very nice idea for hot deployment of plugins. Later versions added more features and new types in plugins.

Currently there are six types of plugins:

• Portlets
• Themes
• Layout Templates
• Web Modules
• Hooks
• EXT

Plugin-SDK:

• The Plugins SDK is a simple environment for the development of
  Liferay plugins.
• Portlet, theme and layout development used to take place in the ext
  environment.
• Starting with Liferay version 6.0, the EXT environment is no longer
  supported.
• The Plugins SDK is to be used instead to create hot-deployable
  portlets, themes and layouts. 

Structure of Plugin-SDK :



Dependencies:



Plugin-SDK Directory Structure :

• All portlets will be in portlets directory.

• All themes will be in themes directory.

• All layouts will be in layouttpl directory.

• All ext will be in ext directory.

• All hooks will be in hooks directory.

• Plugins SDK is a simple environment for the development of Liferay plugins.
• Portlet, theme and layout development used to take place in the ext environment.
• The ext plugin does not support portlet and theme development, except for modifying/extending Liferay’s out-of-the-box portlets.
• The Plugins SDK is to be used instead to create hot-deployable portlets,themes and layouts.
• The Plugins SDK has already been installed for you as part of Liferay Developer Studio, but it can be used standalone as well.