After starting a clean liferay instance, you will see the portal-setup-wizard helping you to configure your portal. It provides help concerning your database-connection, default user,...
After you finished configuration portal-setup-wizard will not show up again. To enable portal-setup-wizard again, you can set the following property inside portal-setup-wizard.properties:
portal.setup.wizard.enabled=true
portal-setup-wizard
Hook- vs Ext-plugin
Using Hooks you can:
- provide a portal configuration (portal-ext.properties)
- define new or modify existing language key (language.properties)
- modify portal JSPs
- define servlet filters
- implement post indexers
- override Liferay-Services (especially by implementing a ServiceWrapper, like for example UserServiceWrapper)
Using an ext-Plugin it is possible to:
- override any class inside Liferay (classes inside portal-iml.jar or portal-util)
- modify Liferay's core portlet's desciptors and configurations (like portelt.xml, liferay-portlet.xml,...)
Ext-plugins are more powerful than hook-plugins BUT ext-plugins are not hot-deployable, an can not be undeployed! If you want to undeploy an ext-plugin, it is recommended to start with a clean liferay instance!