Previously, to customize a core portal JSP, you would have to use the ext environment.

You can do it now in a plugin via our liferay-hook.xml file. Just specify a directory of where your custom JSPs are, and on deploy of that plugin (portlet, theme, hook, etc.), the core portal JSPs will be overwritten with what's in your plugin, and on undeploy, it'll be reverted back.

When writing these custom JSPs, you cannot assume that you will be the only plugin to do this. So this feature is really geared more for SI's that are customing Liferay for a client and don't want to go through the trouble of an ext environment.

This makes sense because you can already override the implementation of beans (via Spring by just setting another implementation) and you an already set events and override portal.properties, so why not JSPs.

Here's a sample liferay-hook.xml.

<hook>
	<event>
		<event-class>com.liferay.wol.hook.events.StartupAction</event-class>
		<event-type>application.startup.events</event-type>
	</event>
	<event>
		<event-class>com.liferay.wol.hook.events.LoginPostAction</event-class>
		<event-type>login.events.post</event-type>
	</event>
	<model-listener>
		<model-listener-class>com.liferay.wol.hook.listeners.GroupListener</model-listener-class>
		<model-name>com.liferay.portal.model.Group</model-name>
	</model-listener>
	<model-listener>
		<model-listener-class>com.liferay.wol.hook.listeners.UserListener</model-listener-class>
		<model-name>com.liferay.portal.model.User</model-name>
	</model-listener>
	<portal-properties>portal.properties</portal-properties>
	<custom-jsp-dir>/META-INF/custom_jsps</custom-jsp-dir>
</hook>