I want to give a quick update regarding 5.1.0, released this morning.

Dropping the RC

Now that the JSR 286 specification has been officially approved, we can drop the "RC" portion from our release. Even though 5.0.0 RC, 5.0.1 RC were production quality, they were labeled as such because the JSR 286 guidelines state that we can't go final until the specification is approved.

Contributions from Sun

The Sun portal teams is making many contributions -- the Open Portal Container has been fully integrated into Liferay. The Sun team is also fixing many bugs and is really giving our development effort a huge lift. Some things to look forward to from the Sun team: WSRP 2.0 Producer / Consumer Integration, SAW workflow, and a presence engine. Keep up the great work guys!

Plugins and Themes

Over the next few days we will be updating all the plugins, portlets, layouts and themes to 5.1.0.

Noteworthy Features

• Roles-based Access Control – We implemented a new permissioning algorithm which limits assignment of permissions to Roles. Other objects like Users, Groups, User-Groups and Organizations will not be available during permission assignment. Rather Roles are assigned to those instead. This significantly reduces the cost of assigning permissions and performing permission checks, delivering a huge performance boost.

• Scheduled Staging and Remote Staging – This allows for a more nimble and flexible process of data transfer whereby groups of data, as specified by the user, in a particular site (ie, communities or organizations) can be sent to remote servers in the same physical machine, the same portal instance (JVM), or to servers that are geographically dispersed. The data import process is flexible enough to take care of various use cases for handling the imported data. Essentially this feature simplifies and speeds up the data transfer process while providing transactional security in its use of logic for handling how data should be inserted into the remote systems. Remote publishing also allows for the scheduling of both data transfers as well as data reversion
• Announcements/Alerts are two portlets that can be used to broadcast messages to a list of users within a known scope. Essentially, they provide a mass messaging engine similar to a "news letter" or one-way messaging. Please see Architect, Ray Auge’s blog entry for more information
• Alerts Portlet – This portlet allows administrators to create customizable alerts for users.
• Alert Management and User Alert Configuration – Users can individually configure how each "type" of alert is delivered to them: SMS (optional), Email (optional), web (not optional). There are also more types that are configurable in the portal properties.
• Integration with the latest jQuery and jQuery UI components
• Scheduling Engine Upgrade – In 5.1, the internal scheduling engine was refactored SOA service.
• Search Engine Upgrade – SOLR has been added as a search engine option in addition to Lucene. Other implementations are pluggable.
• Asynchronous messaging and light weight message bus – Portlets can now communicate together in an SOA fashion within Liferay without having to use a full ESB.
• User Group Page templates – Administrators are now allowed to create template pages (e.g. default portlets on a page, layout, theme).
• New Mail Portlet – Performance and scalability enhancements have been made, as well as support for multiple accounts.
• Groupwise Portlets – The Novell Groupwise Portlets have been verified for this release
• And of course, a ton of bugs have been fixed
   

Thanks to everyone involved. Enjoy :).