Disabling the Public & Private Pages feature in Liferay

When you log into a Liferay portal you get a menu on the Dock Bar (at the head of the page) which allows you to create Public and private pages.

Sometimes you want to turn this feature off.
Add to your portal-ext.properties file the following settings and restart your portal.
For the tomcat bundle, you need to create it in: {install directory}/liferay-{version}/tomcat-{version}/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/portal-ext.properties.

When you have found the file add:

#
# Disabling user private and public pages
#

layout.user.private.layouts.enabled=false
layout.user.private.layouts.modifiable=false
layout.user.private.layouts.auto.create=false

layout.user.public.layouts.enabled=false
layout.user.public.layouts.modifiable=false
layout.user.public.layouts.auto.create=false

This is taken from this post on the Liferay Forum.
See here for details on common Portal properties.