When I was at the European Symposium, I was surprised how many people said to me "Gosh I wish Liferay could do ABC," in which I responded, "But it has -- ever since version X.YZ!"  But I guess part of that is my fault since I don't blog that much about my work.

In any case, I just wanted to highlight two features coming out with 5.3 that some people may be interested in.

1. Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)

This is a new standard that's been brewing to allow for different CMS systems to interchange information.  It is basically another JSR-170 with two important differences: (1) it is not Java-specific and (2) it is document-manangement-centric.  So, our PHP friends, for example, can make a CMIS repository that can be accessed by Liferay or any other CMIS consumer.  For us, we interoperate with a several different types of repositories (e.g., JCR, S3), so I basically just built a hook for CMIS.

If you were interested in enabling this feature, you need to have a CMIS producer setup, and in your portal.properties configure the following:

    dl.hook.impl=com.liferay.documentlibrary.util.CMISHook
    cmis.credentials.username=none
    cmis.credentials.password=none


Also, depending on your CMIS producer, you may have to change the repository URL.  That's about it!  Just one note... CMIS is currently not finalised so it is still at version 0.61.  I'm following the changes in the standard so when it gets to 1.0, we should be able to support that without much trouble.

2. Database Migration

Have you ever setup an entire project, then wonder why you were using the default demo DB Hypersonic and wanted to move to something else?  Or for some reason, just enjoyed changing DBMS every other week?  Well, if you do, I've got news for you -- you can now migrate the data from your existing database to a new one.

All you have to do, is create a new schema in your new database, go to the "Data Migration" tab under the "Server Management" control panel, fill in the JDBC information, and voila!  Data is moved.  After everything is done, your server will be shutdown.  Remember to change your portal.properties to point to the new database, and startup your server again.

Okay, that's it for now.  Next time I'll try to come out with updating more frequently.