Community Roundup

James Falkner
James Falkner
A Minute Read

Greetings from the next-to-last day of 2010.  Hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season!  Liferay is working hard to bring you another great year of technology, innovation, and fun.  I for one am looking forward to the huge number of community events that we have planned (and some that aren't yet planned).  I hope you can make it to one of them (either virtually or in person!).  Now, onto the links!

  • Clustering Liferay has been made easier than ever in Liferay 6.  Sachin shows us how easy it is with GlassFish v2.  Nice.
  • Gaurang's Liferay-centered blog has lots of useful bits of knowledge.  Thanks for sharing!  Now, if only it was hosted on Liferay
  • Rich posted another chapter in his excellent Liferay in Action book.  This chapter includes great stuff like Liferay's asset system, workflow, tags and categories, ratings and commenting, and Service Builder tips.
  • Want to speed up Liferay with simple tweaks?  Check out Sheikh Mohammad Sajid's tips on speeding up page loading.
  • If you're like me, you love to see products come to market built specifically on or around Liferay.  Recently MyOffice24x7 released a very useful Survey Application to the community.  It's these kinds of community activities and products that will really benefit from the coming Liferay Marketplace.
  • Speaking of community, did you happen to catch the thread around linking web content to different pages?  Jorge, Szymon, Grzegorz, Ahmed, Mauro, Orin, Jonas and Ray demonstrated what the community is all about.  Nice to see such engaging activity!
  • The 2011 Liferay Symposium series dates are almost finalized.  The first one out of the gate will be the East Coast Symposium, in Philadelphia, in May.  This year, we are opening up the sessions to the entire community!  Watch for a Call For Papers in early January, and be thinking about topics you'd like to present.
  • Liferay Live is set to start back up January 12 with a session on Staging.  Following that are: Liferay Community, OpenSocial, and others. Don't miss these!  Free to attend!
  • If you plan on hosting your own Liferay event, please let everyone know by registering on the Community Events page.  The more awareness the better!
  • Work on the community landing page is almost done!  The goal is to make this page appear in every community member's bookmark list, and on your daily speed-dial pages to visit (or read via a Feed).  Features include community announcements, links to popular JIRA tickets, community polls, dynamic activity maps, community buzz feeds, release documentation, concentrated developer docs, and other goodies I hope you'll find useful on a daily basis.

That's all for now, see you in 2011!

Page Comments
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Szymon Gołębiewski
14 Years Ago
1. Liferay Marketplace.
Any news about that? I've heard that word a long time ago and as I see nothing changed. Can we see at least some "Developer Diaries" or "Release date"? Lack of it stop us from releasing some nice portlets (like Newsletter portlet).
2. Couple of weeks ago there was a big talk about "who will go through all tickets in JIRA where contributors post their solutions". Can we have some stats about how wany such tickets were in JIRA and how many of them were commited to trunk of Liferay by Liferay staff?
3. What is the status of "JIRA cleanup from obsolete / old / stupid tickets"? There are still so many of them emoticon
4. What is beign done in matter of documentation of Liferay. I saw new JAVADOC (hell yeah!!!) but what about user documentation? Wiki about Asset Publisher still refers to Liferay 5.2 http://www.liferay.com/community/wiki/-/wiki/Main/Asset+Publisher+Portlet :| Liferay is not a Wordpress - there are so many things that need proper User Guide beacuse their are not intuitive.
5. What about community voting for new features of Liferay?
6. There are many Liferay bugs that are very annoying but also they are very quick to fix. Maybe we should start our own "One hundred Paper Cuts" project (https://launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts)?
7. You promised us that you will "engage with us on the roadmap for 6.1 and beyond". I've heard that LR6.1 will be released very soon (Q3'2011) but still I don't see any roadmap on wiki nor any forum / blog conversation about all the nice candys we will see in next version :|
8. Liferay LIVE is a very good idea but when session is 30 minutes long, contains 5 slides and all the information we got is "yes, liferay uses Selenium IDE" it's just a waste of time (yep, it was). And when I miss my session there is no way to see any materials (and I've heard that AlloyUI session was awesome). I think it's not so hard to record session and post it in http://www.liferay.com/web-events. I hope you will agree with me on that.
9. And what about Social Office? Is it dead? New version should be released about 6 months after LR CE :|

Nevertheless keep the good work James. I love your Community Roundup posts but we still in hunger for more information emoticon Happy New Year!
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James Falkner Szymon Gołębiewski
14 Years Ago
1. I'll see what I can dig up. You can always publish your portlets on the community plugin repository. I've a feeling these will be migrated to the marketplace once it's up.
2. I'll gather the stats and let you know. Juan Fernandez has gone through well over 500 tickets the last 6 months and recategorized, closed, commented in, etc.
3. See #2. It's an ongoing process. We are planning a JIRA upgrade in the next month or two and will improve the workflow as well, to hopefully cut down on the bad tickets.
4. The wiki is not an "official" source of documentation. The idea is that the wiki is a place to collaborate on new ideas, document previously un-documented features or other items, and then when fully baked, this information is sedimented into the "official" docs (the admin guide, developer guide, etc). However, we have an ongoing effort to properly tag wiki pages to denote which Liferay versions the content belongs to. As you can see, the page in question is tagged with Liferay 5.0, 5.1, and 5.2. This makes it easier to tell whether the content applies to your particular situation.
5. See #7.
6. This is an excellent idea, and one for which I can offer rewards for participation emoticon One idea is to use JIRA, and relate various "100 papercuts" bugs together. I wish JIRA had a way to arbitrarily tag issues, to make it easier to relate multiple tickets together with the (IMO) heavyweight "relate" feature. There is a plugin for newer JIRA we could use once the upgrade is complete, but for now I would not want to manually maintain a list. Any ideas?
7. There have been multiple presentations at the last couple of Liferay Symposiums regarding roadmap for 6.1 and beyond, and work has already begun on several of these areas. I will update the (much maligned) "roadmap wiki" with new features. Once we have the community landing page up and running in the next week or so I'll post a poll as well, so that we can prioritize what gets in.
8. The recordings for previous sessions will be posted at http://www.liferay.com/web-events . Just a matter of finding the resources to post. The holiday, coupled with the imminent release of 6.0.11 EE, and our yearly retreat, put the brakes on several initiatives such as this one.
9. Not dead, in fact a new version should be out this year, with one of the main features being that we want SO to be able to be added per-community, so that you can "Social Office-ize" one community, while leaving the rest as a traditional portal-based community.
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Szymon Gołębiewski James Falkner
14 Years Ago
1. We're waiting for Liferay Market as we want to easily sell our portlets / hooks etc. Currently community plugins repository is not suitable for that. It even can't sort plugins by modification date so users can't find out about new plugins :/ And if they don't know that there is something new they won't buy / download it.
3. But how community can help you in this cleaning up process?
4. Official documentation is not Editors friendly (sometimes it's not even Administrators friendly). For example try to explain to me (using Administrator Guide) what is "reveiew date" field for (in Web content edition page). All the explanation we can get is that I can set a date for rewieving. But what does it mean? Will I receive a message? Is this the same as Kaleo "due date" field for task?
Or another example: Image Gallery field suggest that I can add "Image gallery application". Is "image gallery application" something lige image gallery? No! Using this field I can only add one image from gallery. I can make gallery by repeating this field but thats a different story. I don't use Administrator Guide - I learn on the fly. I have exeperience in CMS applications but my client Editors don't. And when they ask for help I cant direct them to RTFM beacuse it's too complicated (because it's administrator guide and it has over 400 pages) or useless (see image gallery example).
Is there a plan for Editors guide to Liferay?
Is there a documentalist role inside Liferay Inc.? Who is responsible for those documents? Are there additional "Guides" for Liferay EE with more complex explantions?
5 and 6. My mentor always said "Don't wait for technology to solve your problems - solve them by yourself." We don't need fancy system for voting or for most anoying bugs or managing "100 Paper Cuts".
http://goo.gl/mod/1LXY Workflow will look like this: vote, talk with developers are mentioned bugs are easily fixed, pick 10 of them, prepare a list, submnit that list with ticket status with next relase of Community Roundup, repeat that 10 times emoticon
7 and 8. I (and I think most of community) can't participate in all Liferay Symposiums. Making a video, screencast or posting presentation (that was prepared for symposium) is not a "one month" work. If it's "Just a matter of finding the resources to post" just record screencast of web event - that will do fine. It's better than nothing.
9. Nice to hear that but still haven't received any information about works on SO. Sometimes I think you want to leave all those preatty informations just for yourself emoticon Come on, post it in Community Roundup. We nedd more information about whats going one. This is one of the ways to motivate community emoticon
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James Falkner Szymon Gołębiewski
14 Years Ago
1. Completely agree, the existing plugins repository makes it hard to see what's new/good. The "real" marketplace should have all of the above, plus more features around account management, billing, legal agreements, etc. That's what's taking time to figure out. In the meantime, what about a quick list of the 10 most recent plugins somewhere on the community page? I know it's not great but it may give more visibility to new plugins. I had to search manually to find the "Birthday Notifier Portlet" which was submitted just 3 days ago.

2. As for stats, there's no way with our current JIRA to see how many tickets went from "Community Resolved" --> "Resolved" without being JIRA database experts. We currently have 161 tickets in the "Contributed Solution" state, however it's misleading because most of them were put into this state after the 5.2.x -> 6.0.x transition, in an effort to encourage community members to take a fresh look at their tickets in 6.0.x and see if the issue was fixed (and close it if so, otherwise "Reject Solution" so that the ticket stayed open).

Juan has done a good job at managing all of the "New Feature/Improvement" requests - over 800 in the last 4 months. For new features, we categorize them as either a "Product Backlog" (where Liferay Inc. takes ownership and implements) or "Community Backlog" (where community members are encouraged to pick up and implement these features).

3. The best way for the community to help clear out these is to go through all of the existing tickets (esp. those that are in the "Contributed Solution" state), and verify that the bugs still exist in 6.0.5, and add comments to the bugs indicating whether it still exists or not. Those that do not can be closed as "fixed". Even better, we'd like to start a "Community Verifier" group (we have already identified several members who would be good candidates for this group). This group would have admin rights to be able to close bad or no-longer-an-issue issues. Would you be interested in participating?

4. Our documentation lead is Rich Sezov, who has done an awesome job getting the official documentation to the state where it is now (you may remember pre-Rich, it was a mess). This kind of feedback is what we need more of. In fact, for specific areas (like Web Content Editing or Workflow or Image Gallery), the best way to help with the documentation effort is to create or update an existing wiki page to document what's missing, tell Rich, and he can format it and suck it into the official documentation. This is one of the main benefits of the wiki and it has worked well so far.

5. and 6. I'm all for lightweight solutions. Are you suggesting we use Google Moderator? I can generate a list of "easy to fix" bugs and send them out and ask for volunteers pretty quickly. Many of them already have fixes though, and are awaiting commits. That's one of our bottlenecks currently.

7. and 8. We have the videos somewhere in the basement, awaiting a web person to put them up. I'll see what's involved, and if possible, post them.

9. As soon as we have something to show for SO 2.0, I'll definitely post it! Trust me, I'm trying to get as much information as possible out there as quickly as possible, and I really appreciate your feedback here.
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Szymon Gołębiewski James Falkner
14 Years Ago
1. Good idea but still try to find any info about LR Marketplace emoticon
3. Count me in!
4. I can update wiki and post information for Rich "THIS NEEDS MORE DETAILS" as some features are too complicated and without looking into Java code we can't tell what they do. Also, if you're making new features you preparing functional documentation for it, yes? Can't you attach it to wiki describing that functionality or to ticket in JIRA?
5 & 6. Yep, I'm suggesting Google Moderator.
7 & 8. Can't wait to see them emoticon
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