I am having trouble understanding the concept of portlets in a CMS.
Let's say I write a weather portlet to display current temperature. I build it, package it in a war, deploy the war in Liferay.
Now I created a page, and I want to create 2 instances of the portlet I wrote. I want to display the weather in Seattle and the weather in Miami.
Can I do this? How do I pass the portlet a parameter to tell it which city to display?
Portlet has so-called EDIT-mode. You can implement EDIT mode to show the form to choose which city you want to show the temperature for. Save this to portlet preferences. And when you will render the portlet in normal(VIEW) mode, look at the preferences for the city.