As announced in my last blog post, the period of our milestones has finished and we are getting into the launch field with the release of Liferay 7 alpha 1. We appreciate all the feedback from the people downloading the milestones and participating in the Community Expedition program. If you haven’t sent your feedback yet, it’s never too late to make Liferay the best fit possible for your needs :)

Most of our cross-functional teams have been focused lately on trimming down the known bugs, since delivering a high quality release is our #1 goal for Liferay 7. But don’t think for a second that this alpha 1 is going to be boring to test. On the contrary, since it is the first release where the Lexicon Experience Language has started to surface after many months of hard work. And it’s done it through the front door :)

Lexicon - the new Liferay Experience Language

You may be wondering, what is Lexicon? Lexicon provides designers and developers with a set of patterns (visual and interaction) that are connected to each other and focused on the Simplicity, Efficiency, Consistency, and Beauty. These patterns can be carefully combined, like lego pieces, to obtain the desired user experiences.

Lexicon is a new design language designed to be fluid and extensible while providing a complete collection of visual and interaction patterns. It has been created by our UX team to create outstanding user experiences on top of Liferay. Liferay 7 includes an implementation of Lexicon as an extension of the Bootstrap framework.

If you are able to attend DevCon, or one of our upcoming Symposiums, don’t miss the presentations where Lexicon will be formally announced. A brand new website with all the information will be presented and will be launched soon after.

You are curious about how it looks? Here are some screenshots:

Lexicon is design to be stunning and beautiful, optimized for the most common operations and taking the best from the most popular modern UI patterns out there.

It’s obviously designed to work well with tablets...

And of course with smaller screens too, since it was created with a mobile first approach.

We are working on redesigning the user experience of all of Liferay’s applications (and there are quite a few) to adapt it to Lexicon. The Alpha 1 release we already have the first version for several administration portlets:

1. Web content

2. Forms

3. Dynamic data list

4. Tags

5. Categories

6. Recycle Bin

7. Image Selector

The work on this and several other portlets is ongoing so you can expect many further improvements in the upcoming releases. Meanwhile, feel free to keep the feedback coming.

Platform Infrastructure

Liferay 7 now supports Java 8. The main work here has been in testing, which have caught a few minor (but some highly visible) issues. If you download Alpha 1, go ahead and try it with Java 8. If you find any issues please report it.

Additionally we have done some simplifications to the scripting engine. Instead of shipping out of the box with many different language options, from now on Groovy is going to be our scripting engine by default. The other engines are still supported, so in the case you need any other one, you just need to install it.  

Improvements in WCM

Web Content can now be sorted by priority in Asset Publisher

First of all, we would like to thank Jan Eerdekens and its great contribution to make Liferay better. Everything started when he catched Julio Camarero’s attention by writing this forum thread Liferay - The missing parts: web content article priority, we invited him to contribute the improvement and now asset publisher allows you to filter web contents using priority. We love our community!!! You are great guys!!

The priority of a web content can now be set within Web Content administration, editing the web content and setting the priority within the Categorization options:

The Navigation portlet gets bootstrap super powers

A set of different bootstrap nav styles have been included in the navigation portlet as application displays templates. From the configuration option in the navigation portlet, those styles can be selected to decide which style will be applied to the page name within the site.

Ability to group Site Pages

This is a commonly requested feature and common extension that is now provided out of the box. Liferay supports having an unlimited number of site pages organized in a hierarchy, but up until now all pages were assumed to have some content.

Now, site administrators can create pages of type “Node” (tentative name, suggestions welcome) that have the only purpose of grouping child pages.

By having this new page type the default theme can be smart about it and...

1. Don’t show a link to it, instead make it a drop down

2. Only show it in the navigation once it has some child elements

If you were hard-coding this type of behaviour for specific pages in your custom themes, there is no longer a need to do so. That will make your themes much more reusable!

Improvements in Calendar & Workflow

Workflow of calendar events can be configurable via Kaleo

We added a new resource “Calendar Event” in the Workflow configuration options, there you can select the workflows that calendar events have to follow

Later, when you create events in the different calendars you have access or you manage, they will follow the assigned workflow to them, and those events can be managed by the user from “My workflow tasks” option menu:

The user can assign to herself the tasks, update the due date or it can assign it to other users who have same roles as her. A comment can also be included on the assignment pop up window:

In addition to these highlighted improvements, Alpha 1 includes +100 stories finished since M7 was released the last month.

So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and download Alpha 7 now from sourceforge and keep the feedback coming.

Esther Sanz & Jorge Ferrer