Did you like what you saw in previous milestones? You didn’t feel there was enough meat to be worth your time? Get ready for Milestone 4 which comes bundled with many improvements and new features. Not only that, with this release we are launching the Liferay 7 Community Expedition program which will allow intrepid adventurers to work with the Liferay developers to find bugs and provide early feedback on the new features.

This milestone includes +130 stories finished since M3 was released. Let’s take a look at the most interesting improvements.

Web Content Management

There are several super-cool feature in the design kitchen, but for now the work is being focused on modularizing and adding new extension points. As a result of these work many portlets have been converted to OSGi modules (RSS, XSL Content, Nested Portlets, IFrame,  Sitemap, Breadcrumb, Tags Navigation, Tags Administration, Categories Navigation,  Categories Administration and Web Content Display) which among other benefits will allow us to improve them much faster than before going forward (since it won’t require a new release of the whole product).

In addition to this, one small frequently requested feature was added: Ability to translate the site and name description.

Staging

In a previous milestone I described how in Liferay 7 it will be possible to create custom export/publication configurations. Early feedback has shown that this feature can be so frequently used that in some cases there will be many of them. Because of that we have added the ability to search through the saved export configurations.

Also, we’ve made it easier to select which configuration a site admin wants to use when publishing right from the dockbar:

WYSIWYG Editing  

The highlight of Milestone 2 was Alloy Editor and the feedback we have received so far has been great. However there is one feature that several power users reported missing: the ability to edit the HTML code directly. We didn’t want just to attend this request but we wanted you to be as amazed as many people were with the new WYSIWYG edition. Because of this our frontend gurus have been using their great skills to good use in order to create the best HTML editing experience you’ve seen in this type of environment.

You can check it out in the blogs portlet (which is the first to adopt Alloy Editor, more will come later). You can now see an small icon in the upper right corner to enable the code editor:

When you click it the WYSIWYG editor will be converted to a code editor, with numbered lines and syntax highlight (courtesy of AceEditor).

And of course if you are used to coding with a dark background (quite common these days) we have you covered as well. Just click on the small moon icon in the upper right corner:

But this is not all. Several of us thought that for certain cases you want more space (the full screen) to do the editing. And since we are just making a wish list here, what if you could preview the result as you are typing your code? … You have it :)

Pretty neat, right?

We are quite proud of the result and hope you like it. We actually got so excited about the result that we might take it a bit further, but I will keep the surprise until next milestone.

Geolocation

In Milestone 3 we presented the new out of the box support for geolocalization. We received some pretty good feedback that is making us rethink the feature backend a little bit. While we do that we have improved the presentation logic so that the map shown to geolocalize the assets is configurable to be OpenStreeMap, Google Map or a custom implementation.

Document Management

Google Docs can now be linked inside the Document Library alongside other documents. When this feature is enabled a new option appears in the Document Library to add a Google Doc. A dialog will appear letting you browse your Google Drive and choose a document to include in the Document Library. The document can also be edited from the Document Library.

Collaboration Suite

Three small but useful improvement were made to our collaboration suite:

• Wiki: ability to move wiki pages for one node to another.  

• Ratings: Ability to choose the ratings type to use per content type.

• Blogs: Support for cover images for blog entries

Developer oriented improvements

To finish I’d like to highlight a few new extension points and API improvements for developers:

1. Ability to add custom icons or menus to the portlet decoration (aka portlet box or portlet borders).

2. New API layer that allows manipulating form definitions and values as objects, instead of having to manipulate the underlying XML directly.

3. Implemented the capability of adding new field types for DDM through OSGI modules (See the Text type for an example). We hope to see a lot of third party types.

That’s it, if you haven checked previous milestones I hope this large list motivated you to go to the downloads page for Milestone 4 at sourceforge and get it. If you want to get really involved in testing it and giving feedback, check the Liferay 7 Community Expedition program and join many other enthusiastic explorers :)

PS: I'd like to thank Esther Sanz for all her help gathering the data presented at this blog. Without her I wouldn't have made it on time :)