I'm very happy to announce the release of Liferay Portal 6.2 CE GA3! Download it now: [Tomcat Bundle] [JBoss Bundle] [GlassFish Bundle] [Source Code] [Other bundles and Files] [Quick Start] [Detailed Install Instructions].

This release is particularly noteworthy. Why is that? Well, if you attended DevCon in Germany last year, you probably don't remember it, but I promised you a regular 6-month community maintenance release cadence, starting with the 6.2 CE GA3 release on January 15th. Mind you, this presentation was over 2 months ago. Guess what today is! Yep, it's January 15th. We actually hit the promised date (pause here for applause). And you can expect another 6.2 CE release this summer, in mid-July. This will continue until the next major release (Liferay 7). This year we're going to do some really fun things in the community around the 7 release, so stay tuned for more info on that (or watch the video in its entirety).

Now, back to the topic of this post. This update corrects many issues found by our open source community and customers since the GA2 release (10 months ago). Our community and Liferay's continuous testing teams contributed to finding and fixing these bugs. Want to know more? Read on!

Release Naming

Following Liferay's official versioning scheme, this release is Liferay Portal 6.2 CE GA3. The internal version number is 6.2.2. Future CE releases of 6.2 will be designated GA4, GA5, .. and so on (assuming they are needed to fix issues, which is not always the case). See below for upgrade instructions from 6.2.x, 6.1.x, 6.0.x, and 5.x.

Downloads

You can find the 6.2 CE GA3 release on the usual liferay.com downloads page. If you need additional files (for example, the source code, or dependency libraries), you can find them on SourceForge as well.

Maven Artifacts

Developers can find this release in our Maven repository, and it should be showing up on Maven Central in the near future. As a reminder, you can also find SNAPSHOT releases of Liferay 7!

Source Code

As Liferay is an open source project, many of you will want to get at its guts. The source is available as a zip archive on the downloads page, or in its source code repository on Github. The repository has also been tagged for the release (as a reminder, the liferay-plugins repo no longer gets tags for portal releases as the plugins are de-coupled from core). Many community contributions went into this release, and hopefully many more in future releases! If you're interested in contributing, take a look at our new participate page on the Liferay Developer Network.

What's New / Changed?

This update fixes many issues [full list here], but here are some of the more important and/or popular ones that you may be interested in:

• All known security vulnerabilities since GA2 was released
• Ability to define model listeners for models that are defined in plugins (LPS-15144)
• Categories not selected from Asset Publisher (LPS-48904)
• Liferay startup very slow with windows 8.1 (LPS-47215)
• Friendly URLs with locales names (LPS-27075)
• Previewing a forum post edit causes it to become Draft Status and invisible to other users (LPS-31730 -- hurray! for me! and you!)
• Side panels should addapt to fit the phone screen size (LPS-40938)
• Other minor issues discovered in GA2

Known Issues

One of the things you get with a regular release cycle is the peace of mind of knowing that releases don't have to be held up by minor issues - it can get fixed in the next release, and no one should have to suffer delays because of really minor issues. There are a couple of items we found during testing that were deemed not to be "showstoppers" and will likely be fixed in the next release.

• The issue of document/folder thumbnails in DM portlet (LPS-51862) (related Tee Shirt)
• DDL List Records not links (LPS-48682)

Documentation

The Liferay Documentation Team has been continuously adding and improving on the official documentation. This includes updated javadoc and related reference documentation, updated tutorials and learning paths, and a new home on the Liferay Developer Network. While still in beta, this site will also become the new home of our developer and technical communities.

Our community has been instrumental in identifying the areas of improvement, and we are constantly updating the documentation to fill in any gaps. Check out Rich's blog for more detail on how you can get involved.

Also note that the liferay-ui taglib reference documentation has is now included in the reference docs! The reference docs are available for browsing at http://docs.liferay.com/portal/6.2/ and for downloading as an archive.

Support Matrix

Liferay recently published the official compatibility matrix for 6.1 and 6.2. This is the official support matrix for our Enterprise Subscription customers, but it's a pretty good reference for CE as well. If you're wondering where Java 8 support is at, it's expected in the next release (we don't typically add new supported platform software in a maintenance release, and Java 8 wasn't ready when 6.2 was).

Liferay Marketplace

Most Liferay-authored Marketplace plugins were updated to support 6.2 GA1 when it was first released, and remain compatible with this updated GA3 release.

If you are a Marketplace Developer, and have authored a 6.2 CE GA1- or GA2-compatible app, you should ensure your app continues to work with this 6.2 CE GA3 release. It is Liferay's aim to remain compatible within a given release family, so in the unlikely event that your app works with GA2 but NOT GA3, you will need to make any necessary changes and re-submit, and let the Marketplace team know about any incompatibilities you discovered. Chances are you will have nothing to do (since you declared compatibility with 6.2.0+, which includes 6.2.2).

Bug Reporting

As always, the project continues to use issues.liferay.com to report and manage bug and feature requests. If you believe you have encountered a bug in the new release (shocking, I know), please be cognizant of the bug reporting standards and report your issue on issues.liferay.com, selecting the 6.2.2 CE GA3 release as the value for the Affects Version/s field.

Upgrading

Good news for those of you on 6.0 or prior! Liferay introduced the seamless upgrade feature with Liferay 6.1. Seamless upgrades allow Liferay to be upgraded more easily. In most cases, pointing the latest version of Liferay to the database of the older version is enough. There are some caveats though, so be sure to check out the Upgrading Liferay information on the Liferay Developer Network for more detail on upgrading to this release.

Getting Support

Support for Liferay 6.2 CE comes from the wonderful and active community, from which Liferay itself was nurtured into the enterprise offering it is today. Please visit the community pages to find out more about the myriad avenues through which you can get your questions answered, and check out the new Liferay Developer Network for technical resources during your Liferay journey.

Liferay and its worldwide partner network also provides services, support, training, and consulting around Liferay via its Enterprise Subscription.

Also note that customers on existing releases such as 6.0 and 6.1 continue to be professionally supported, and the documentation, source, and other ancillary data about these releases will remain in place.

What's Next

Of course we in the Liferay Community are interested in your take on the new features in Liferay 6.2 and the updates in this GA3 release. Work has already begun on the next evolution of Liferay, based on user feedback and community ideas. If you are interested in learning more about how you can get involved, put on your participation hat and dig in.

As I mentioned earlier, we will start doing regular open source releases of Liferay Portal every 6 months, until the next major release. So if you find bugs in this or previous releases, and want to up their priority to get them fixed, be sure to use JIRA and vote for your favorite issues!

Kudos!

This release was produced by Liferay's worldwide portal engineering team, and involved many hours of development, testing, writing documentation, translating, testing some more, and working with the wider Liferay community of customers, partners, and open source developers to incorporate all sorts of contributions, both big and small. We are glad you have chosen to use Liferay, and hope that it meets or exceeds your expectations!

In addition to Liferay's engineering staff, a special thanks goes to the many open source developers who volunteered their time and energy to help with the release, whether it was bugfixing, idea generation, documentation, translations, testing, or other contribution that helped to improve this release. Check out the Community Contributor Hall of Fame and be sure to thank them if you run across them in the community (or add your name if you have contributed and are not listed).