Blogs
Matija Šuklje
At Liferay we take our Open Source roots seriously and are increasing our commitment to the movement.
When we look at how people can contribute to Liferay Portal, one of the bigger hurdles was that our contribution process is quite complex – including having to create a JIRA ticket and through that sign our Liferay Portal Contributor’s Agreement. That required setting up an account on our internal JIRA even if for simple contributions.
Today we are announcing that we have gotten rid of the JIRA step(s) and simplified contribution by replacing it with a CLA assistant integrated into GitHub.
Which means that now you do not need to create a new account or leave GitHub to sign it. In addition, now you only need to sign it once, when you first contribute to that repository, and that signature will be bound to your GitHub
Unfortunately, this means those contributors who already signed via JIRA in the past will have to sign again, and I do apologise to all affected. Fortunately, this will be just a one time task (as opposed to the JIRA process before).
Of course, we do not intend to stop here, and this is just a first step towards a more streamlined and enjoyable contribution experience! Stay tuned for more in the future …
Details
The text of the Liferay Portal Contributor’s Agreement stays the same, we just transformed it to MarkDown for better integration.
On the software side, after comparing several options we chose CLA Assistant, which is developed and hosted by SAP as Open Source software. Just in case we are making regular backups of the list of signatures.
The initiative for this move was done in collaboration between our Developer Relations and Legal teams. I would particularly like to extend kudos to Milen Dyankov, for kick-starting this discussion.
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Are you new to Liferay? Found Liferay and want to know what it can do for you? Or are you with Liferay and still remember the time when you were new and unexperienced? Where did you come from and what was the biggest problem you faced? Can you ever learn enough? And how do you keep up with the current trends and new features?
A platform as big as Liferay spans several technologies and areas of best practices that are beneficial to know of. Nobody can know everything - there's always a learning curve. At the beginning, it's quite steep. Some argue that it's flattening the more you know. Some argue that it gets steeper: The more you know, the more you know what you don't know.
Today's Target Audience: Developers, new to Liferay
Java Web Technology
You new Developers will have to know some things about the internals of an Application server. Don't worry, not the implementation, but the Servlet Specification (which assumes that you know Java). In a Java Application, you typically deal with a lot of different classloaders - no difference in Liferay, although this is mostly abstracted away. In some random cases it's coming back at you though.
