It’s the end of the year season and most programmers take a few days of to spend time with family and/or friends and of course check out some new technologies. While we know there are many exciting new techs to choose from, we wanted you to have at least one more option to choose from by making available a new and shiny milestone of Liferay 7. This is a great opportunity to see the latest developments that are getting so many people excited after our symposiums and DevCon.

This milestone includes 160+ stories finished since M2 was released, but the one that probably shines the brighter is the out of the box Geolocation support. As Juan Fernández mentioned in his blog, this milestone already contains the capability to geolocate web content, documents & media and dynamic data lists. The location can be setup to be entered manually by the user (entering an address) or automatically using the HTML5 geolocation feature.

This becomes a really cool feature as soon as you start displaying a list of assets in a map, something that you can also do out of the box by picking the mapping template of Asset Publisher:

And in case you were wondering, you are not tied to Google Maps. You can also use OpenStreetMaps or add any other maps provider. If you haven’t done so yet, go ahead and read Juan Fernandez’s blog about the new geolocation support. This capability will be added to other content types later including your custom ones, through Custom Fields, so take a look at it now and provide your feedback, since you will get a lot of benefit from it :)

The second highlight of the release is how the process to modularize more and more parts of the core using our OSGi-based infrastructure is gaining a lot of speed. As proof of that here is an screenshot of the directories that hold the extracted out modules so far (the collapsed dirs just contain one module inside with the same name and -web as a suffix):

Finally here are some other smaller improvements that I considered worth of mentioning:

• Web Content types have been converted to a categories vocabulary (with an automatic upgrade process for those previously using Web Content types).

• Added back the ability to download Structured Web Content as an XML from the Web Content administration UI.

• Improvements in the default configuration: Message Boards notifications will include the name of the poster, blog lists will use abstracts instead of full content.

• Added support for “Likes” for any asset type in addition to the two existing rating systems: stars and thumbs up/down

• Alloy Editor which debuted in Milestone 2 has also received improvements, specially based on the feedback in the blog entry and during Liferay DevCon 2014. In particular two new buttons were added to the editor: for writing code and for quotes. Additionally some issues were fixed, such as: AE-75. Work has also started to implement larger improvements such as a code editor.

• Many improvements to the APIs of DynamicDataMapping (DDM) are also included in this release, specially increasing the features exposed through remote APIs.

That’s it, if you are eager to check it out, just go to the downloads page for Milestone 3 at sourceforge. I hope you enjoy it and please send us all of your feedback :)

Happy Season to everybody!