6.5. Friends, Romans, and countrymen: they’re all social relations

You may have noticed in figure 6.6 that the Requests portlet says “Customer Two wants to be your friend.” This comes out of the Language.properties file in the portal, not from the portlet itself. Remember: internally, Liferay calls this concept a social relation, in order to keep the concept as generic as possible and to let you decide what you want to call these things in your own social network. They can be friends, Romans, countrymen, connections, relatives, coworkers, or whatever.

When we go over hooks in chapter 8, you’ll see how to customize the Language.properties file in the portal so the Requests portlet displays whatever you want it to. If you want your social relations to be “homeys,” so be it. But I need to mention one last important factor about social networking before you delve deeper into the code: security.