I'm very happy to announce the release of Liferay Portal 6.2 CE GA4! Download it now: [Tomcat Bundle] [JBoss Bundle] [GlassFish Bundle] [Source Code] [Other bundles and Files] [Quick Start] [Detailed Install Instructions].

Once again, this release is particularly noteworthy. Why is that? Well, if you attended DevCon in Germany last year, you probably don't remember it, but I promised you a regular 6-month community maintenance release cadence, starting with the 6.2 CE GA3 release on January 15th. And on January 15th, we did it: we released GA3.

And then guess what? You discovered a fatal flaw in GA3 that was particularly annoying and impactful, especially on the "first impression" of Liferay. After some discussion in the community we all agreed a new release was needed rather than wait the usual 6 months, so here we are 3 months later with a new release that includes your most requested fixes, along with many others. It's great to see such cooperation! You spoke, we listened (and you spoke and we listened again), you helped us fix it up, and now we release a GA4 that we hope will meet your needs better than ever!

Release Naming

Following Liferay's official versioning scheme, this release is Liferay Portal 6.2 CE GA4. The internal version number is 6.2.3. Future CE releases of 6.2 will be designated GA5, GA6, .. and so on. See below for upgrade instructions from 6.2.x, 6.1.x, 6.0.x, and 5.x.

Downloads

You can find the 6.2 CE GA4 release on the usual liferay.com downloads page. If you need additional files (for example, upgrade SQL scripts or dependency libraries), you can find them at the bottom of the downloads page.

Maven Artifacts

Developers can find this release in our Maven repository, and it should be showing up on Maven Central in the near future. As a reminder, you can also find Maven artifacts for Liferay 7 Milestone Releases (here's one of them) in the liferay-previews repository!

Source Code

As Liferay is an open source project, many of you will want to get at its guts. The source is available as a zip archive on the downloads page, or in its source code repository on Github. The repository has also been tagged for the release (as a reminder, the liferay-plugins repo no longer gets tags for portal releases as the plugins are de-coupled from core). Many community contributions went into this release, and hopefully many more in future releases! If you're interested in contributing, take a look at our new participate page on the Liferay Developer Network.

What's New / Changed?

This update fixes many issues [full list here], but here are some of the more important and/or popular ones that you may be interested in:

• All known security vulnerabilities since GA3 was released
• Guest users unable to see images/attachments (LPS-44724)
• CKEditor now works in IE11 (LPS-51183)
• Prev and next does not work in Media Gallery (LPS-41728)
• Asset Category selector's and Asset Category Admin's search ignores the user's display language (LPS-43709)
• Reviewer or Publisher is considered the author of a web content (LPS-53685)
• Many more (about 357)

Known Issues

These are issues that were found during testing, but deemed not a showstopper (usually things are left as-is because they aren't severe (data loss/security breach), don't affect very many people, and there is a convenient workaround - luckily our 6 month cadence means you don't have to wait more than 6 months!). For details on workarounds, see the bug reports.

• Writing to search index fails when Index Writer queue is full (LPS-54672) 
• lucene/dump does not work when starting a node (LPS-54876)

Documentation

The Liferay Documentation Team has been continuously adding and improving on the official documentation. This includes updated javadoc and related reference documentation, updated tutorials and learning paths, and a new home on the Liferay Developer Network. While still in beta, this site will also become the new home of our developer and technical communities.

Our community has been instrumental in identifying the areas of improvement, and we are constantly updating the documentation to fill in any gaps. Check out Rich's blog for more detail on how you can get involved.

Support Matrix

Liferay has published the official compatibility matrix for 6.1 and 6.2. This is the official support matrix for our Enterprise Subscription customers, but it's a pretty good reference for CE as well. If you're wondering where Java 8 support is at, it's expected in the next release and has already been added as supported platform for EE.

Liferay Marketplace

Most Liferay-authored Marketplace plugins were updated to support 6.2 GA1 when it was first released, and remain compatible with this updated GA4 release.

If you are a Marketplace Developer, and have authored a 6.2 CE GA1, GA2, or GA3-compatible app, you should ensure your app continues to work with this 6.2 CE GA4 release. It is Liferay's aim to remain compatible within a given release family, so in the unlikely event that your app works with GA3 but NOT GA4, you will need to make any necessary changes and re-submit, and let the Marketplace team know about any incompatibilities you discovered. Chances are you will have nothing to do (since you declared compatibility with 6.2.0+, which includes 6.2.3).

Bug Reporting

As always, the project continues to use issues.liferay.com to report and manage bug and feature requests. 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 6.2.3 CE GA4 release as the value for the Affects Version/s field.

Upgrading

Good news for those of you on 6.0 or prior! Liferay introduced the seamless upgrade feature with Liferay 6.1. Seamless upgrades allow Liferay to be upgraded more easily. In most cases, pointing the latest version of Liferay to the database of the older version is enough. There are some caveats though, so be sure to check out the Upgrading Liferay information on the Liferay Developer Network for more detail on upgrading to this release.

Getting Support

Support for Liferay 6.2 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, and check out the new Liferay Developer Network for technical resources during your Liferay journey.

Liferay and its worldwide partner network also provides services, support, training, and consulting around Liferay via its Enterprise Subscription.

Also note that customers on existing releases such as 6.0 and 6.1 continue to be professionally supported, and the documentation, source, and other ancillary data about these releases will remain in place.

What's Next

Of course we in the Liferay Community are interested in your take on the new features in Liferay 6.2 and the updates in this GA4 release. Work has already begun on the next evolution of Liferay, based on user feedback and community ideas. If you are interested in learning more, join our expedition team and see what's under the hood of Liferay 7!

As I mentioned earlier, we will start doing regular open source releases of Liferay Portal every 6 months, until the next major release. So if you find bugs in this or previous releases, and want to up their priority to get them fixed, be sure to use JIRA and vote for your favorite issues!

Kudos!

This release was produced by Liferay's worldwide portal engineering team, and involved many hours of development, testing, writing documentation, translating, testing some more, and working with the wider Liferay community of customers, partners, and open source developers to incorporate all sorts of contributions, both big and small. We are glad you have chosen to use Liferay, and hope that it meets or exceeds your expectations!

In addition to Liferay's engineering staff, a special thanks goes to the many open source developers who volunteered their time and energy to help with the release, whether it was bugfixing, idea generation, documentation, translations, testing, or other contribution that helped to improve this release. Check out the Community Contributor Hall of Fame and be sure to thank them if you run across them in the community (or add your name if you have contributed and are not listed).