Q:

How to customize blog portlet in liferay

I am new to liferay and using liferay-ce-portal-7.0-ga3 i have placed a blog and able to write contents in it. i want to change the blog portlet design by adding thumbnail preview to it . My current view is it has either title,abstract and full content view. How could i customize to get blog view 

A:

You can customize Liferay's appearance through Application Display Templates (ADT). Unfortunately there's no sample for the OOTB appearances, but when you go to your site's (or the global site's) Configuration area, you can find/edit/create ADTs there. Depending on the markup and CSS, as well as your typical image size etc., the actual ADT you write would be different, thus impossible to include anything here. 
The editor however, has some autocomplete and some predefined entries/fields, that should give you a starting point. E.g. when you just open a blank editor and hit the "Blog Entries" field, you'll end up with
<#-- Application display templates can be used to modify 
     the look of a specific application.  Please use the 
     left panel to quickly add commonly used variables. 
     Autocomplete is also available and can be invoked 
     by typing "${". -->

<#if entries?has_content> 
  <#list entries as curBlogEntry> 
    ${curBlogEntry.title} 
  </#list> 
</#if>

You'll find what you can do with BlogsEntry in it's javadoc, make sure to follow the BlogsEntryModel superclass link as well to see more.
I'll have to leave the exercise to generate proper markup and styling to you though.

