# Liferay Portal Basics

Because the Discovery Framework is built upon the Liferay Portal, you need to know Liferay basics before you begin developing your Discovery Framework application.

- About the Liferay Portal
  The Discovery Framework is build upon the Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition.
- Liferay Portal features used in the Discovery Framework
  This section describes Liferay Portal features that have been incorporated into the Discovery Framework.
- About plugins
  Plugins are .war files that allow you to add functionality to the Discovery Framework. In the Liferay Portal, portlets, themes, and layout templates are all considered plugins.
- Accessing Liferay Portal documentation
  Because the Discovery Framework is built upon the Liferay Portal, you can access Liferay's documentation for more information about how to perform various tasks.