When you generate a JSF portlet project with RichFaces libraries, the RichFaces part is not really as ready for use as it could be - e.g. LoadStyleStrategy and LoadScriptStrategy are set to NONE so you have to include the relevant scripts manually and when you add a JSF portlet to the project, the pages which are created do not contain RichFaces tag library declaration. I don't see any JSF template containing the declaration for RichFaces either, which means you have to find and add it by yourself.

My suggestion would be to have templates for JSF pages with RichFaces among other JSF/JSP templates and/or have something like this

 <ui:composition
      xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"
      xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"
      xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
      xmlns:a4j="http://richfaces.org/a4j"
      xmlns:rich="http://richfaces.org/rich">
...

instead of something like this

<ui:composition
      xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"
      xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"
      xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html">
...

in generated JSF pages when the RichFaces libraries are included in the project.