title: how do I get the user's first name on Liferay?
body: <p>I'm new to both Liferay and Java and I've been struggling for a day on how to get the user firstname, the documentation on this product is really poor so any help would be highly appreciated.
  So I'am working on a portlet and i want it to display the users first name, this is the view.jsp file:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/portlet_2_0" prefix="portlet" %&gt;
  &lt;%@ page import="javax.portlet.PortletPreferences" %&gt;
  &lt;%@ page import="com.liferay.portal.model.UserModel " %&gt;
  &lt;%@ taglib uri="http://liferay.com/tld/ui" prefix="liferay-ui" %&gt;
  &lt;portlet:defineObjects /&gt;
  
  
  &lt;liferay-ui:success key="success" message="Greeting saved
         successfully!" /&gt;
  
  &lt;%
  PortletPreferences prefs = renderRequest.getPreferences();
  String greeting = (String)prefs.getValue(
  "greeting", "Hello! Welcome to our portal.");
  %&gt;
  &lt;%
  
  %&gt;
  &lt;p&gt;&lt;%= greeting %&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  &lt;portlet:renderURL var="editGreetingURL"&gt;
  &lt;portlet:param name="mvcPath" value="/edit.jsp" /&gt;
  &lt;portlet:param name="userName" value="Test" /&gt;
  
  &lt;/portlet:renderURL&gt;
  
  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="&lt;%= editGreetingURL %&gt;"&gt;Edit greeting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I already played with the usermodel class or interface, I actually found the method :getFirstName() but I just cant get it to work.</p>