Portlets are web applications developed for integration within a portal. A portlet can provide any desired functionality: showing the local weather, offering full message boards functionality, providing an interface for back end services, or orchestrating different web services in a SOA architecture.

Liferay comes with several useful bundled portlets and also supports 100% the JSR-168 standard, which allows the portal administrators to deploy any third party portlet developed according to this standard.

After deploying a portlet to Liferay any user that has the roles required by the portlet itself will be able to use it in their private or public home pages, in the private or public website of a community, or in the public website.