Blogs

Welcome to my first community roundup of 2012.  Yes, I know I've been slacking big time.  The holiday break, and inevitable pile of work to do post-holiday, has kept me away from the roundup.  But I'm back with a rundown of all that is happening in the Liferay community, so start clickin'!

• Of course the Big News so far in 2012 is Liferay's release of the 6.1 Community Edition.  Packed with features and improvements, including a new setup wizard, enhanced WCM and user management, and many more.  See some of the external coverage here, here, and here (and here, auf Deutsch).  Also don't miss Seb's first review!  A great start to the new year! (Maven fans - here's your present).
• One of the things I'd like to see in 2012 is getting back to the source in our open source roots.  In that vain, I've kicked off a new way to be a part of the community: Liferay Community Projects! We are going to elevate these kinds of community-driven open source projects to a higher level of visibility on liferay.org, providing more collaboration tools (like user groups) and project status. If you are interested in starting a new project (or housing an existing project) on liferay.org, fill out the form and get started. 
• BitNami wasted no time integrating Liferay 6.1 into their set of available stacks.  You can get Liferay as an easy to use installer, a VM image, or an AMI for Amazon EC2!  
• Late last year, Liferay held it's 2nd annual Liferay Italy Sympsium in the beautiful and historic city of Rome.  Check out the pictures from the venue, and check out SMC's nice video recap and pictures!  Also check out this nice written recap (in Italiano) by Andrea.
• Speaking of Liferay Symposia, we are gearing up for the 2012 season.  The first one out of the gate will be our first ever in Scandinavia, The Liferay Nordic Symposium in the idyllic city of Stockholm, Sweden.
• Olaf has published several more Radio Liferay releases, the latest of which features several of our high profile community members discussing their contributions and thoughts on our community. Check out the Radio Liferay feed page for more details and links to the streams.
• TSG is fresh from Alfresco DevCon and writes up a nice piece on Lessons Learned integrating the two.
• Liferay's User Groups continue to expand, with new groups beginning in Finland, the UK, and Detroit. Visit the User Groups page to see all the recent activity.
• Several of you may have heard rumblings about OSGi and Liferay.  Check out this interview with Raymond Augé regarding the Arkadiko project, which is an upcoming Liferay Community Project.  
• For you Londoners, a first London Liferay Meetup happened on January 19th.  Pics and wrap-ups will hopefully be forthcoming!
• Liferay strives to keep up with new initiatives in the standards space.  Liferay has of course been invoved in past standards efforts, such as JSR-168, JSR-286, CMIS, and more.  Liferay is once again participating in the (free to all) upcoming OASIS standard around WEMI (Web Experience Management Interoperability).  The title may be buzz-wordy, but the goals are not.  If interested, get involved!
• Sagar gives a nice rundown of applying advanced workflow to custom assets.  
• Drew spent some time on Liferay's IRC channel and with the help of the community was able to successfully (and quickly) complete an upgrade from 6.0 -> 6.1.  Nice work!  Drew spent his unexpected free time creating this masterpiece.
• Here is a very interesting piece of work to reverse-engineer Liferay's entity relationships.  I was really hoping a nice ER diagram was waiting for me at the bottom of this post, but perhaps an astute reader cares to take a stab at making one?
• Are you kidding me?  An Android app that allows one to peruse social content from a Liferay site?  Wow.  I can't wait for someone to try it out and let me know what it looks like.  Screenshots look very promising!
• The Liferay Community's BugSquad team recently concluded their efforts for 6.1 and decided on the two best tee shirt designs.  Shirts will begin shipping soon to those who participated.  Wear your shirt with pride, for it is this team that made a huge contribution to Liferay 6.1! 
• EmDev has released a new version (6.1) of their Activiti Liferay plugin.  This brings support for Liferay 6.1 (yay!), Activiti 5.8 and some other minor improvements.  Thanks Alexey!
• What do you know about Kaleo?  Now I know 10 more than you you..
• Many of us are comfortable with Liferay technology and remember what it was like when we were not so familiar with it. There are many more community members who are struggling with basic Liferay concepts, and need a quick intro to common tasks. The Liferay Community is embarking on a new effort to contribute high quality learning guides (in the form of videos and written word).  Check out the Liferay University Video Topics page and sign up for your favorite topic!
• Attention MacBook Air owners.  You have a new skin.  You can thank me later.
• Our very own Paul Hinz wrote a nice piece on Portals vs. Web CMS for CMSWire.  A good read, and it's not a blatent plug for Liferay either :)
• More news on the Liferay IDE front: Liferay IDE 1.5 is now available!  Features such as a hook configuration editor, importing binary projects, JSP debugging over remote Liferay links, and first class support for GlassFish.
• More from Bradey Wood's Liferay Tips - Embedding Navigation Portlet into Layout File.  Keep 'em coming Brad!
• If you use Liferay's Friendly URL mapping functionality, you may appreciate this handy friendlier friendly URL Mapper from DevJohnny.  
• For those of you into BlazeDS and Adobe Flex, here's a nice writeup by fandry explaining how to create Liferay portlets that use both.  
• Our awesome Liferay Community Verifier team is hard at work scouring the Liferay issues database and improving its quality. A contest is ongoing, if you're interested, follow the thread and sign up!  You can follow the progress of the team here.
• This Saturday in Alicante the Liferay Spain User Group will hold a meetup.  The meetups thus far have been very well attended, and you do not want to miss this one if you can make it! Arroz y Liferay!  Can't be beat :)
• Random tweet: @benb3342: #Liferay skills on LinkedIn up 29% year on year.
• Ever wanted to do an ls -l from a portlet?  Well now you can, with the Liferay Portlet Shell!
• Liferay Workflow provides a lot of features, one of which is notifications.  When a workflow item lands in your queue, you want to know about it.  Configure email notifications using this handy reference.
• Wonder what powers Liferay staffers?  Now you don't have to wonder!
• Chris Stavros from LEVEL Studios is found in this gem from last year's Liferay West Coast Symposium.  I personally found his talk and his demo (which is not in the video) very inspiring and eye-opening to the possibilities of really useful ways to use Liferay.
• James McGovern, one of our industry's notable thought leaders, provides his thoughts on Liferay's Service Builder and Liferay Security.  Thanks James!
• Here's a handy script to.. ahem.. kill Liferay processes on unix-based systems.  Hopefully you don't need this too often :)
• Too many blog posts and wiki page updates to list today.  Well, ok, a couple.  DDL III.  SASS.  Sesame.  Social Equity. Github Cheating.  That is all I have time for.  The rest can be found at blogs.liferay.com.

I hope you all have a great, safe, and productive 2012 in whatever endeavour or passion you might have! I'll leave you with this quote:

"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila." - Mitch Ratcliffe

On with the show!