Blogs

Liferay Portal 7.1 Alpha 1 Release

I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of: Liferay Portal 7.1 Alpha 1

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We announced the Liferay 7.1 Community Beta Program on February 19th alongside our first 7.1 Milestone release. We launched the first phase of the community beta program which was to receive feedback from our community on new features being released in each milestone release. Our awesome community heeded the call with over 120 participants and over 130 posts to the feedback forum. We greatly appreciate all the feedback generated from our community. Based on some of the feedback we even made changes to the product itself!

With that being said it is my pleasure to announce Liferay 7.1 Alpha 1. With the release of Liferay 7.1 Alpha 1 we also would like to launch phase 2 of our beta program: Bug Reports. If you run into an issue using Alpha 1, please let us know by posting it in our Feedback Forums. If you have yet to sign up for the beta program, it's never too late. Sign up today!

New Features Summary

Modern Site Building: Liferay 7.1 introduces a new way of adding content. Fragments allows a content author to create content in small reusable pieces. Fragments can be edited in real time or can be exported and managed with the tooling of your choice. Use page templates from within a site and have complete control over the layout of your content pages. Navigation menus now give you complete control over site navigation. Create site navigation in new and interesting ways and have full control over the navigations visual presentation.

Forms Experience: Liferay 7.1 includes a completely revamped forms experience. Forms can now have complex grid layouts, numeric fields and file uploads. They now include new personalization rules that let you customize the default behavior of the form. Using the new Element Sets, form creators can now create groups of reusable components. Forms fields can now be translated into any language using any Liferay locale and can also be easily duplicated.

Redesigned System Settings: System Settings has received a complete overhaul. Configurations have been logically grouped together making it easier than every before to find what's configurable. Several options that were located on Server Administration have also been moved to System Settings.

User Administration: User account from has been completely redesigned. Each form section can now be saved independently of each other minimizing the chance of losing changes. The new ScreensNavigationEntry let's developers add any form they want to user administration.

Improvements to Blogs and Forums: Blog readers a can now un-subscribe to notifications via email. Friendly URLs used to be generated based on the entries title. Authors now have complete control over the friendly URL of the entry. Estimated reading time can be enabled in System Settings and will be calculated based on time taken to write an entry.

Blogs also have a new cards ADT that can be selected from the application configuration. Videos can now be added inline while writing a new entry from popular services such as: Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook Video, and Twitch. Message boards users can now attach as many files as they want by dragging and dropping them in a post. Message boards also has had many visual updates.

Workflow Improvements: Workflow has received a complete UI overhaul. All workflow configuration is now consolidated under one area in the Control Panel. Workflow definitions are now versioned and previous versions can now be restored. Workflow definitions can now be saved in draft form and published live when they are ready.

Infrastructure: Many improvements have been incorporated at the core platform level, including ElasticSearch 6.0 and the inclusion of Tomcat 9.0. At the time of this release JDK 8 is still the only supported JDK.

Known Issues

List of known issues in Liferay 7.1 Alpha 1

Documentation

Documentation for Liferay 7.1 is well underway. Many sections have already been completed in the Deployment and Development Sections. For information on upgrading to 7.1 see the Upgrade Guide.