One of the toughest parts of contributing to Liferay is that we are very strict with the coding and design style. We do this because we believe that keeping a very high level of consistency is what allows the product to keep evolving at maximum speed.

Fortunately there are very smart people in the community that have been able to learn this rules just by looking at the code and they keep sending patches of awesome quality. But we often receive patches that have to be completely refactored or rewritten because they don't satisfy our guidelines. The thing is that our guidelines are not documented anywere so it was not easy to learn them. Or at least not until now...

The good news is that we've just started an effort to fix that. In the wiki you can now find the Liferay Core Development Guidelines. It is divided in 3 different documents:

• Liferay Core Technologies: The main technologies used in Liferay Portal and how to use them to extend it's funcionalities and add new ones
• Liferay Development Style: Coding and Design style
• Liferay UI Guidelines: How to create usable and consistent interfaces in Liferay.

It's only the beginning but we believe that it already contains a lot of useful information. Including source code formatting rules!

I hope you like it, and please keep the feedback coming.