Today Liferay announced the winners of the 2014 Liferay Marketplace App Contest! This year, we were super excited to see what our community could dream up, and you did not disappoint. The review team witnessed an unmistakeable and significant increase in overall app quality this year, so it was even more difficult to pick the winners. A big thank you goes to each of you who took the time to create and submit your apps to the contest, because without you, we'd never see the variety and creativity of apps that a big community of awesome people can produce. Ok, enough babbling, onto the results!

The Grand Prize Winners

This year, with the introduction of paid apps, we judged across two different axes: commercial/non-commercial and free/paid, which resulted in 4 different categories and 4 grand prize winners (and 4 runners up). This allows those with less available resources (i.e. people, time, and money) to still compete and win! Apps were judged for their creativity and usefulness, ease of installation/setup, user interface, user experience, Liferay integration, and completeness of solution. Here are the grand prize winners for 2014:

Social Apps Proxy (Free; developed by Stian Sigvartsen)

If you are building apps that integrate with all the things social, this app implements the most boring and complex part of that integration, and exposes a simplified interface for your app's customers to connect your app with their preferred social networks. It acts as a proxy between your app and any OAuth-based social network (like Twitter, LinkedIn, etc). OAuth is complex and difficult to get right, so this app does the magic for any number of external networks with which you wish to integrate, and does so securely within the Liferay platform!

Visioneo Reports PE (Paid; developed by Dominique Pardon)

Visioneo is a complete reporting application, allowing you to embed high quality reports into Liferay. Using the popular Open Source BIRT Eclipse designer, you can create powerful reports containing charts, data tables, cross-tables, images, grids, multiple pages and many other things from your own datasources (including Liferay itself!). There are two versions available: a Community Edition (CE) and a Professional Edition (PE). The Professional Edition includes enhanced Liferay integration through reports permissioning and document integration.

Tori Forum (Free; developed by Vaadin Ltd)

Tori is a discussion forum portlet with a fantastic user interface and experience. Features like real-time notifications and in-page navigation make it easy and comfortable to use. Also included are real time notifications, a re-use of Liferay's forums backend (and is therefore a drop-in replacement), enhanced SEO and page indexing, custom badging, and much more. With a fast and fluent in-page navigation pattern and integrated analyics, Tori Forum is a great alternative front to the built-in message boards!

Vahtie - Survey and Insight (Paid; developed by Arcusys Ltd)

Vahtie is a powerful survey and feedback management solution for organizations to do employee, customer and research insight. It's designed to support large scale organizations natively on Liferay platform. It's proven and tested in production and it's currently being used by organizations with tens of thousands of users. It's a turn-key solution to a problem that pretty much every company or organization has - how to improve business based on feedback from those that use whatever it is that your company or organization produces.

Each Grand Prize app will be on display at an upcoming Liferay Conference - if you're interested in learning more about them and meeting the developers and companies behind these apps, check out our upcoming events listing to see if there is an event nearby that you'd be interested in attending!

The Runners Up

Announcements (Free; developed by Guillaume Lenoir)

This app implements a social announcements platform, using categories and vocabularies from Liferay. Users can create and manage announcements of varying purpose across multiple different sites, and includes support for adding rich media, workflow for announcements, native integration with Liferay's asset management framework, support for social activity streams, comments/likes/views, and uses Liferay's out of the box UI to provide a pleasing experience with virtually no changes.

Social Login for Liferay (Paid; developed by Moisés Belda)

Social Login for Liferay is a plugin which enables users to login to Liferay using their preferred social networks, including support for the most popular social networks like Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even includes support for Microsoft network login. It is OAuth2-based, and uses AlloyUI components to give users a great mobile and desktop experience when logging into your portal.

MapIt Now (Free; developed by 3F Consulting)

This plugin uses a visual geographic map to visualize the location of content such as blog and wiki posts, forum threads, users, and any other asset type in the Liferay platform. Implemented as a standard AlloyUI/JavaScript component, you can add multiple maps to a page, and link it to other built-in asset presenters such as Liferay's Asset Publisher. Administrative controls allow you to selectively enable or disable different asset types, and choose which mapping service and layers to use (e.g. OpenLayers/OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, Bing, and others). Paid plugins are also available to change the way the data is presented.

Intelligus TeamWorXX (Paid; developed by PFI Knowledge Solutions Ltd)

Intelligus TeamWorXX is a web-based collaboration and social networking suite, which leverages and extends the social and collaboration features of Liferay. TeamWorXX is aimed at helping groups of users work together effectively and share knowledge online. Used by over 250,000 users worldwide, Intelligus TeamWorXX is a feature rich web collaboration platform that hosts the UK's largest platform for public service collaboration. Intelligus TeamWorXX lets your users manage everything from searching all visible groups, members and content, to contributing ideas, posting announcements and creating polls.

Some Stats

• 301 apps available on the Marketplace
• 750 Enrolled Marketplace Developers
• 150 Enrolled Marketplace Companies
• 480k Views
• 280k Downloads
• 98 Total contest submissions from 15 countries (Australia, Belgium, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Finland, France, Hungary, India, Italy, Peru, Romania, Spain, UK, USA)

... In Closing

This year we saw a huge increase in app quality during the contest: initial setup, UX, Liferay integration, you name it. Every single app in the contest was useful and I think shows the power of a community of people finding new and creative ways to use Liferay technology to solve real issues. Well done everyone!