Liferay is proud to announce the Liferay 6.1 CE Beta release!  The Liferay product and engineering teams, in close concert with our awesome community, have spent many months getting the 6.1 release ready, and this is one of the final builds before it will be generally available.  We are making this release in advance of the 6.1 GA release, in order to ferret out last minute issues, and get the great work that the the teams have poured into this into your hands earlier.

New stuff since 6.0

The community has been hard at work.  Over 2500 individual issues have been resolved, and several new major and minor features make up 6.1.  Ed Chung gave a great overview of these 6.1 themes and features at the East Coast Symposium.  Here's a cheat sheet to some of the major ones (many in the community will undoubtedly be familiar with them, as you helped develop and/or review them!)

• Multiple Repository Mounting - including CMIS 1.0 Support
• Unification of the Document Library and Image Gallery
• Native support for storing videos and other media types
• Robust content metadata management
• Establishing contextual relationships between content types (Related Assets)
• Enhanced staging support (including Branching, Versioning, and Rollback)
• Dynamic Site and Page Templates
• User Customizable Pages
• User Defined Lists (Dynamic Data Lists)
• Workflow-enabled Forms
• Mobile Device Detection
• Unified User Management
• RESTful Web Services
• OpenSocial 1.1 Support
• Enhancements for Liferay IDE 1.4
• More social networking and collaboration feaures  (too many to list!)
• Better Scalability
• Better Management and Monitoring
• Better Documentation
• Better Quality
• ..."And There's More!"

Downloads

The beta release will be available on our downloads page soon.  In the meantime, the usual files (portal bundles, sql scripts, CE plugins, and other supporting files) can be found on SourceForge: portal bundles and plugins.

6.1 Documentation

Our documentation continues to improve.  With the help of the community, our end user, administrator, and developer documentation have all improved tremendously.  The effort to document this release continues through this beta.  While the final documentation has not yet been published (it will be published with the GA release), its open source nature means you can take a look at the development, and even contribute to the "code".  If there is a specific new feature you are interested in learning about, you are encouraged to use any of the myriad avenues through which the community supports its constituents, or you can just give the Beta build a try today!

Bug reporting

If you experience issues with this beta release, and believe it to be a bug in the product, you are encouraged to file a report at issues.liferay.com.  There is a specific release to denote in the Affects Version/s field: 6.1.0 B3 (Beta-3).  The issue will be triaged, and if it has a big enough impact, will be fixed for the final GA release.

Upgrading to 6.1

As this is still a beta, you are should not use this unsupported release in a production environment.  However, it is a good way to test that your eventual upgrade will succeed with the minimum of fuss.  Several of our BugSquad members have already successfully upgraded their customized Liferay 6.0 environments to the early 6.1 builds, and this build gives you a chance to do the same.

Going Forward

As we approach the final GA release, there may be additional Release Candidate builds to fix any last minute issues.  As always, you are encouraged to participate and contribute to the project, and I hope you enjoy this sneak peek!