Blogs

I am happy to announce that Liferay.com is now running on Liferay Portal 6 EE. The re-fresh is a minor one with respect to content but a major infrastructural upgrade that will pave the way for future enhancements to the site, including leveraging workflow for our web publishing and community interaction, and the introduction of social equity for our community participation. 

As for the changes you can see, here is a summary: 

Liferay Projects Pages
​With all the open source projects we've incubated in the company over the last couple of years, we decided it was finally time to give them a home. Liferay's new Projects Pages puts faces to the names behind these efforts and will be the best place to look for new information and updates. Check it out!

Updated Community Pages
Also as part of our project page refresh, we've re-organized the forums to have a top-level category for each project. These will break down further by language as each project grows. Of course, Portal is still the heavyweight here. :) 

​New Events Pages
With the rapid growth of our community and partner network, Liferay is the topic of conversation in a growing number of places! We re-designed the events pages to make it easier than ever to meet in person with other Liferay enthusiasts. Now we have a single events list that shows all upcoming events regardless of type in a single view. We also made it easier to filter the list with several different parameters including geography. 

Mobile Device Friendly Layouts
The update with the biggest WOW factor has to be the new layouts that adjust to the detected width of your browser. Liferay wants its site to be accessible by people on the go, but we didn't want to have to invest too heavily in a single platform's proprietary aspects since there are so many great ones out there to support. So we took a standards-based approach, and using just HTML5 and CSS, re-designed the site so that each device's browsable area will be accommodated. Here are three different views for desktop, tablet, and smartphone: 

Desktop view. This has all the content on the home page.

Tablet view (iPad portrait mode). The difference is subtle but the banner image has been resized and
the entire right column of content (Gartner MQ, France Symposium Mini-Banner) has been removed.

Smartphone view (iPhone portrait mode). Navigation is now phone-friendly and
the most essential information is shown first; graphics are reduced for bandwidth. 

Of course you can try it yourself—just resize your browser window now and see what happens! 

Revamped Customer Portal
EE customers will notice a new layout for the Customer Portal home page. We got rid of the introductory fluff and provided links to the most often accessed content to make the whole site easier to navigate. 

Miscellaneous: Pingbacks
Pingbacks on blogs are now enabled, so when someone refers to your Liferay.com blog from the web, you should automatically get a comment on that entry (testing this out on Olaf's latest blog). 

Miscellaneous: Updated HTML Editors
The HTML Editors used in Liferay 6 should perform better and be easier to use than the previous versions. 

Oui, Nous Mangeons Notre Nourriture Pour Chiens
Yes, we eat our own dog food here at Liferay. :) But the reason we find it so tasty is because it meets so many of our business needs: 

• Rich Web content management capabilities. We serve hundreds of pages on Liferay.com and support multiple editors working in the same system. LIferay's integrated portal + WCM foundation makes this easy. 
• Multi-lingual support. We have community members around the world and do our best to support them in their language.
• Collaboration and Community. Obviously Liferay's community is an important part of our business and we want to support interaction through Blogs, MBs, Wikis, Activity Tracking, Profiles, Relationships and meta-data (tagging, comments, ratings). 
• Multi-site Management. Liferay.com users can access our public website, employee portal, customer portal, and personal user profile all in one place. Our site administrators are thankful that they don't have to deal with several different deployments.
• Personalization. Each user should have his own view of portal assets across various sites, from the website to their support entitlements and license key management. 
• Workflow and Customization. We also use Liferay for a lot of our marketing initiatives. We try to understand what kind of content people are looking for and help them get connected to the right collateral. We also follow up with people when there's new information available that might interest them.   
• Integration with Salesforce and Other Enterprise Systems. Of course a portal isn't a portal without some EAI thrown in and we have plenty of needs in that area. 

Many of these areas saw vast improvements in Liferay 6 and we we will be taking advantage of them with this new launch. We hope you enjoy it too and definitely let us know if you come across any issues or have suggestions for further improvements!