We recently upgraded our live site to use the latest 5.0.x branch. Besides that, we also introduced our first set of custom social networking portlets for use on www.liferay.com. They're code named "WOL" for World of Liferay. The code is available at http://lportal.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lportal/plugins/trunk under the package wol-portlet.

WOL serves two purposes. First, it serves as a sample social networking site that uses Liferay's Social services. Many of our clients already use them, but we obviously can't just publish their code. So think of WOL as our Java pet store. Just as the pet store illustrates JEE blueprint principles, so WOL illustrates Liferay's Social services. The big difference though is that we're actually using WOL. Liferay's Social services are also exposed via OpenSocial so it's standards compliant and via JSON/SOAP for easy integration.

Second, WOL serves to help foster the Liferay community by tying in message boards, blogs, JIRA, wikis, meet ups, and other community activity under one umbrella. We're big advocates that a portal framework is a solid foundation for building social networks. And what better way to show the world we believe that, than to use our own open source software to help connect our community.

We're also looking for better ways to reward and track contributions to the Liferay community. For example, in World of Warcraft, you kill monsters. And in killing monsters, you gain experience and level up. In the same way, on www.liferay.com, we'll be measuring involvement in the community via killing "bugs", posting message board threads (did you help someone or are you just a spammer?), etc.

There's a lot more details that we'll be fleshing out in the coming months. So feel free to let us know what you think.

Point systems...

Levels...

Guilds...

Quests...

This is going to be fun.