It's been a very long time since my last post but I promise I'll make up for it with a series of posts about the latest features we've been working on for the next releases of Liferay Portal. But first, I want to blog about a topic that I think will be of a lot of interest for Portal developers: how to optimize Liferay to make development faster.

In other words how to put Liferay in what we might call a "developer mode". What would this mode do?

• Disable all caches to reduce the need to reboot after making changes to CSS files, JavaScript files, Velocity templates in themes and Journal, etc.
• Increase the amount of information output in case of error (very limited for now)
• Disable features meant for production servers or evaluators

How have we achieved this? In a very simple and extensible way, by creating a new configuration file called portal-developer.properties. In order to turn on the developer mode you just have to modify the installation of Liferay you use for development to make sure the new file is loaded. The exact instructions and more details about what are its effects can be found in the wiki article Liferay Developer Mode

I've been working in this mode for several weeks now and it really makes a developer's life much easier :) But still I think this is just the beginning there are probably more optimizations we can do to this mode. So if you know of an existing property in portal.properties that should have a different value than the default during developer let me know and I'll add it. Also, if you can think of a new property that we could create to switch on or off certain behavior I'm all ears :)