Community Edition Release Strategy

To our valued Liferay Open Source Community,

Over the past two years, Liferay has implemented significant changes to our product release strategy. These adjustments, moving from a weekly to a quarterly release cycle and introducing Long-Term Support (LTS) versions every four releases, were made to enhance the quality and reliability of our commercial offerings.

Throughout this evolution, we've also been mindful of the evolving needs of our community. In order to best support you, Liferay Portal Community Edition (CE) will now follow an annual release cycle, directly aligned with the Long-Term Support (LTS) versions of Liferay Digital Experience Platform.

We understand this is a substantial change, but we feel it’s the best way to support organizations using CE in production, even those with no interest in ever having a commercial relationship with Liferay. LTS releases are our most hardened, stable releases—the ones for which we offer a combined five years of premium and limited support—and the ones we encourage customers to use. By aligning to the LTS releases, organizations using CE in production can rest assured that they’re using only rigorously tested, enterprise-grade functionality.

One of the biggest advantages of Liferay is its flexibility to meet the needs of diverse organizations. The new CE release cycle will continue to support that. We encourage you to leverage Liferay Client Extensions and the built-in low-code tooling in CE to customize and extend Liferay to meet your unique needs.

Rest assured that you will also not have to wait for an annual LTS release in order to test new features. At Liferay we pride ourselves on continuous innovation and encourage you to experiment with the features we develop in-between LTS releases by downloading the source code that’s always available in the master branch.

We’re also evaluating ways to specifically support CE users, including offering hosting for CE deployments and access to our managed Security Plus offering, which includes machine learning-based DDoS protection, blocking bots, vulnerability reports, and auto-scaling insurance.

Have feedback? We’d love to hear from you! Please continue to engage with us by participating in our Community Slack, reading or contributing a community blog post, or joining a Liferay User Group.

We deeply appreciate your continued engagement and contributions to the Liferay ecosystem. Your passion is what makes our community so vibrant and our software so powerful. We look forward to continuing this journey together.

Sincerely,

Marco Leo
Chief Product Officer