The word is out in Twitter, we have released the first development milestone release of Liferay 7. This is a call for really adventurous developers to try it out and give us your feedback. Here are the answers to the questions you may have about the release.

So… is Liferay 7 close to being released?

Nope. Our current thinking is that Liferay 7 will be released in the second half of 2015. But we will be releasing several milestone releases before that.

What’s the goal of milestone releases?

We want to give adventurous developers an opportunity to take a sneak peak of the new features and frameworks as they are being developed. This will give *you* an opportunity (directly or by finding a friendly adventurous developer) to provide early feedback and help steer the release.

A second goal, which will be especially important for the first milestones is to fine tune our internal release process now that the product and team has grown to quite a large size.

What’s the quality of Milestone 1 like?

Don’t expect it to be stable other than for testing out some of the new features. Of course never run it in production.

The milestones are always built from our master branch and while we work towards making it stable, it’s definitely not for running in production (and at times even for testing). We will make efforts to make it stable to allow for testing but since there is no testing phase there might be last minute changes that break things. If you find them, congrats! You are a real adventurous developer exploring unexplored territory ;)

Ok, cool, but what’s new in this release?

Here are some highlights that we would like you to look at:

• WCM:

  • Inheritance of categories, vocabularies, application display templates and structures and templates from a parent site.

  • Definition of category vocabularies specific to specific Web Content Types or Document Types.

  • The support for web content folders has been extended by allowing users to subscribe to specific folders (and content types) and by providing the ability to set up separate workflow processes per folder (and content types)

  • Web Content Diffs for comparing web content versions, changes when approving them or receiving an email of the latest changes.

  • Support for Application Display Templates (ADT) to the Login,  Language and the Breadcrumb portlets.

  • A cool new quick keyboard navigation to any place in a page

  • Ability to configure mail notification templates in multiple languages.

  • Ability to edit the basic web content structure like any other structure (LPS-45107)

  • Replace ckBrowser by our own file selector (LPS-45046)

  • Staging: ability to save the configuration of a publication to live (or export), multi-step publishing (authoring -> UAT -> Production) and automatic detection of references to content of other sites.

• Collaboration & Social:

  • Ability to @mention users from any portlet that uses a WYSIWYG editor

  • Applied portal notifications to the subscriptions of Blogs, Wiki, Message Boards, …

  • Ability to Geolocate Web Content and documents. Also a new template for Asset Publisher to show them in a map.

• UI Infrastructure

  • Update to Bootstrap 3. Frontend devs rejoice!!

  • SPA Enabler: You really need to try this out. Thanks to this new cool technology (based on our own SennaJS and AlloyUI Surface) all portlets automatically become Single Page Applications and users can navigate through them without reloading the whole page. Expect huge gains in both speed and data transmitted (which is great for mobile access)

• Platform Infrastructure

  • Replacement of Lucene with ElasticSearch as the default search engine

  • Support for testing plugins and OSGi modules using Arquillian

  • Exposing many of the extension points in portal.properties and all extensions of liferay-portlet.xml as OSGi components.

  • Exposing many new extension points like Portlet Filters

  • Ability to develop complete portlet as OSGi modules

  • Ability to create standard OSGi modules that invoke Liferay’s core services API easily (it’s no longer needed to create a web app to do this, simplifying the task significantly and reaching a wider Java dev audience).

  • Ability to use Service Builder in OSGi modules

  • Ability to expose any Java Service in an OSGi module as a JSON Web Service (even without using Service Builder!)

  • The prototype release of the new Eclipse Equinox Http Service implementing OSGi RCF 189 - Http Whiteboard

  • Support for JSPs in OSGi modules

  • Several smaller portlets extracted from the core

  • The work to extract Liferay’s large core apps as OSGi modules has started although none of them have not landed in master yet much of the infrastructure is already in place (Expect more news in M2)

There are also many more small improvements and technical changes, since we organize our work in the form of Stories we’ve prepared a page with a list of all stories organized by area in the following URL: https://issues.liferay.com/secure/StructureBoard.jspa?s=235 (Thanks Esther for setting this up!)

Where can I download it?

At the usual page in Sourceforge’s downloads page. If you prefer to get them from a Maven repo you can get it from Liferay’s maven repo. If you prefer to get it from GitHub you can use the 7.0.0-m1 tag.

That’s it, we look forward to hearing your FEEDBACK!

PS1: Big thanks to James Falkner, Julio Camarero, Nate Cavanaugh for proof reading and help make the entry more complete

PS2: The source for the cover image is https://www.flickr.com/photos/defenceimages/8329373315/in/photostream/