It's finally here - Liferay Portal 6.1 GA2! [Download] [Quick Start] [Documentation]

This is an update release for Liferay Portal, bringing a host of fixes and some improvements based on feedback from the community.  

Release Nomenclature

Following Liferay's versioning scheme established in 2010, this release is called Liferay Portal 6.1 CE GA2. The internal version number is 6.1.1 (i.e. the first update release of 6.1). Future CE releases of 6.1 (if any) will be designated GA3, GA4, .. and so on. See below for upgrade instructions from previous releases.

Downloads

You can find the GA2 release on the usual downloads page. If you need additional files (for example, the source code, or dependency libraries), visit the additional files page.

Changelog

In addition to the numerous bugs that have been fixed since 6.1 GA1, Several new improvements have gone into this release. Highlights include:

• Support for the newly release Liferay Marketplace!  For details on how to use GA2 with the Liferay Marketplace, check out the relevant chapters in the Liferay Portal User Guide.  For information on how to develop for the Marketplace, read the Liferay Portal Development Guide (note that you cannot yet upload your plugins to Marketplace - it's coming soon!).
• All security fixes from the Community Security Team have been rolled into this release
• Support for Danish language [LPS-14931] and fixes for many other languages.
• A new Welcome Page & Theme (replaces "SevenCogs") - A simplified intro for new Liferay users with links to relevant content on liferay.com.
• Portal Access Control List [LPS-26263] - Allows plugin developers to declare the resources their plugins use, which is verified at runtime.
• Visual improvements to JSON WS Management [LPS-24874]
• New support for: HTML5 Audio, Vaadin 6.7.4, Tomcat 7.0.27, GlassFish 3.1.2, JBoss 7.1.1, JOnAS 5.2.3,  Jetty 7.6.3, Resin 4.0.27, Hibernate 3.6.10, and Spring 3.0.7

Documentation

As always, the Liferay Documentation Team has been hard at work updating all of the documentation for the new release. This includes updated javadoc and related reference documentation, and updates to the User Guide and Development Guide. You may have been watching the progress of it via its new home on github, but if not, you can access the full documentation on the documentation page.

Bug Reporting

As always, the project continues to use issues.liferay.com to report and manage bug and improvement tickets. If you believe you have encountered a bug in the new release (shocking, I know), please be cognizant of the bug reporting standards and report your issue on issues.liferay.com, selecting the 6.1.1 CE GA2 release as the value for the "Affects Version/s" field.

Upgrading

As a general rule, you can upgrade from one release of Liferay to the next. This means that you can upgrade from 5.2 to 6.0, or 6.0 to 6.1, but not directly from 5.2 to 6.1. For 5.2 to 6.1, you would need to progress from 5.2 to 6.0, then 6.0 to 6.1. See the Upgrading Liferay chapter of the Liferay User Guide for more detail on upgrading to 6.1.

For users of GA1, you can directly upgrade to GA2 following normal upgrade procedures found in the documentation.

Getting Support

Support for Liferay 6.1 CE comes from the wonderful and active community, from which Liferay itself was nurtured into the enterprise offering it is today. Please visit the community pages to find out more about the myriad avenues through which you can get your questions answered. Liferay and its worldwide partner network also provides services, support, training, and consulting around its flagship enterprise offering, Liferay Portal 6.1 EE, an update of which is due to be released shortly after this CE update.

What's Next?

Of course we in the Liferay Community are interested in your take on this update. Work has already begun on the next evolution of Liferay. If you are interested in learning more about how you can get involved, visit the Liferay Community pages and dig in.