Liferay Portal 7.3 CE GA6 Release

We are pleased to announce the release of Liferay Portal CE 7.3 GA6!

Today marks one of our biggest releases to date.  For the first time ever both Liferay Portal and Liferay Commerce are being released in tandem and Liferay Commerce is now bundled with Liferay Portal.  Getting started with  Liferay Commerce is as simple as downloading the release bundle (or docker image) and starting it up.  Going forward each Liferay Portal release will be accompanied by a Liferay Commerce release.

For more information see: Liferay Commerce 3.0 Release

Download options

Liferay Portal and Liferay Commerce share the same Bundle and Docker image.  To get started using either Liferay Portal or Liferay Commerce, choose the best download option suited for your environment below.

Docker image

To use Liferay Portal 7.3 CE GA6 and Liferay Commerce 3.0 in docker, run:

docker run -it -p 8080:8080 liferay/portal:7.3.5-ga6

For more information on using the official Liferay docker image see the liferay/portal repo on Docker Hub.

Bundles and other download options

If you are used to binary releases, you can find the Liferay Portal CE GA6 and Liferay Commerce 3.0  release on the download page.  If you need additional files (for example, the source code, or dependency libraries), visit the release page.

Dependency Management

If you are developing on top of Liferay Platform using Liferay Workspace, you will only need to define a single dependency artifact by adding the following line to each modules build.gradle file:

dependencies {
   compileOnly group: "com.liferay.portal", name: "release.portal.api"
}

By setting a product info key property it will be possible to update all dependancies to a new version by updating the liferay.workspace.product property in the liferay workspace projects gradle.property file:

liferay.workspace.product = portal-7.3-ga6

When using an IDE such as Eclipse or IntelliJ all apis are immediately available in autocomplete for immediate use. 

Liferay Portal Features

Experience Management

Dedicated translation experience for web contents

Now Liferay allows the possibility to define roles for translators where they will be able to translate web content articles to the languages they are allowed to. Translators will perform the job from a new side by side UI that optimizes the translation process. Additionally, this translation process is integrated with our workflow capabilities, allowing teams to review in parallel the different translations, approve the ones that are ready and wait for the needed ones to be ready before publishing the final article.

LPS-97829

Centralized search for connected asset libraries

When creating content, it is fundamental for users to easily find the collaterals they will need. With the addition of asset libraries, the pool of assets to take into considerations grows. Now Liferay has a new filter “Everywhere” within the item selector that will help users search for assets across all connected asset libraries, including the current site, returning aggregated results.

LPS-107034

Use Document types stored in Asset Libraries to create documents in Sites

Continuing the evolution of  Asset Libraries to help teams organize content that needs to be reused across sites, now it is possible to expose the document types stored in an asset library to be used to create documents in the connected sites.

LPS-117929

Questions app

Users are used to visiting your site to look for answers to the problems they are facing. These answers can come from information provided by the company directly, or from other users. To help users find issues similar to theirs and the answers they are looking for, we’ve developed a new application focused on questions and answers that take full advantage of the GraphQL APIs and the message boards infrastructure.

With this application, users will be able to group the questions on different topics, ask any question they have, vote the answers, mark the most valuable answer so others can check it easily, etc.

Common Fragment Styles

Get pre-defined styling options for all fragments

When creating a new fragment, developers can define fragment custom styles options for each fragment. However this is a laborious effort that must be redone every time a new fragment is created. Common styles will allow fragment developers to create fragments with a set of pre-configured style options. To do that, we have separated the styles property (CSS based) from general configuration that controls markup and display contents. We are also providing the flexibility to fragment developers to add (or hide) styles properties for specific fragments using the JSON definition of the fragment.

The Jira ticket for this feature is LPS-113707

Digital Operations

App Builder Internationalization

Now users can internationalize the applications created through the App Builder by applying translations to make it available in different languages. To create localized applications, you just need to select and translate the fields to the languages you want while building the Form View of the Object’s Application.

Form Rules on App Builder

Just like in Forms portlet, App Builder also will now count with a Rule Builder to define dynamical behaviors for fields of each Form View of the application, like set visibility of a field or using a predefined condition to enable or disable a field. To start defining rules in a Form Views, click in the Rules option present in the right menu bar of the Form View builder.

App Builder Fieldsets

App Builder was also enhanced with a fieldset capability, which allows users to create, update and reuse frequently used groups of fields in different objects and forms views. This way, users don't have to recreate one same group of fields (e.g. address) over and over for each application. To start creating and using fieldsets, access the Fieldset tab on the right sidebar of the Form View Builder.

Forms Reports

Liferay Forms counts now with a built-in summary report of the answers received, allowing users to not only see the data collected, but also have an overall analysis of answers of each field according to the field type.

Epic Link

Forms Page Reorder

The UI/UX of Forms page management was enhanced to not only make it easier to create and manage multi-page Forms, but also to allow reordering pages of a Form. A feature that was highly requested by the community and is now available in Liferay Portal 7.3 CE GA6.

Data Engine Improvements

Aside from the UI provided by App Builder, Data Engine also had a few improvements on its APIs and architecture to augment the developer experience when using Data Engine to build applications, including:

  • Ability to create and reuse fieldsets.

  • Search Data Record Collections.

  • Render a layout by its Data Definition Key.

  • Create Version Attributes for Data Definitions and Layouts.

  • Search Data Layouts by name.

  • Scope Data Definitions by using ClassNameId.

  • Save a data definition using the builder taglib.

  • Make Data Records localizable.

  • Ability to nest fields.

  • New Field Types and visual elements:

    • Separators;

    • Rich Text Fields;

    • Image Fields;

    • Geolocation Fields;

    • Color Fields.

Platform Improvements

Headless APIs extensibility

The headless APIs cover the most common use cases, but sometimes, the projects you’ll be working on might need some modifications to fit 100% your needs. For that reason, we have implemented different extensibility mechanisms that will allow developers to perform changes such as: exposing new properties or new components in the OOTB applications, deactivating endpoints, add contributions in GraphQL, etc

LPS-98329

Asset Libraries delivery APIs

Asset Libraries are meant to help you organize and reuse the content better. This becomes key with the growth of different channels that are available and also, there are situations where creating a whole site to feed content to a mobile or web application might be too much. Now Liferay provides access through the headless REST and GraphQL APIs to the content and documents stored in an Asset Library, allowing customers to create dedicated content repositories with the collateral needed for a new microsite the company is working on.

LPS-106987

Return facets in collections

To create more dynamic applications making use of the headless APIs, now it is possible for developers to request the available facets when retrieving collections of elements (documents, structured contents, etc). This will allow developers to build dynamic filters to show to end-users where they can choose the information they are interested in.

LPS-106992

Documentation

All documentation for Liferay Portal and Liferay Commerce can now be found on our new documentation site called learn.liferay.com.  For more information on our new documentation initiative see the official announcement here.

Compatibility Matrix

Liferay's general policy is to test Liferay Portal and Liferay Commerce  against newer major releases of operating systems, open source app servers, browsers, and open source databases (we regularly update the bundled upstream libraries to fix bugs or take advantage of new features in the open source we depend on). 

Liferay Portal 7.3 CE and Liferay Commerce 3.0 were tested extensively for use with the following Application/Database Servers: 

Application Server

  • Tomcat 9.0

  • Wildfly 16.0 (Previously 11.0)

Database

  • HSQLDB 2 (only for demonstration, development, and testing)

  • MySQL 5.7, 8.0

  • MariaDB 10.2

  • PostgreSQL 11.2 (Previously 10)

JDK

  • IBM J9 JDK 8

  • Oracle JDK 8

  • Oracle JDK 11

  • All Java Technical Compatibility Kit (TCK) compliant builds of Java 11 and Java 8

Source Code

Source is available as a zip archive on the release page, or on its home on GitHub. If you're interested in contributing, take a look at our contribution page.

Bug Reporting

If you believe you have encountered a bug in the new release you can report your issue by following the bug reporting instructions.

Getting Support

Support is provided by our awesome community. Please visit helping a developer page for more details on how you can receive support.

Fixes and Known Issues

 

Blogs

Looking good!

Just out of curiosity: Is it still possible to use Liferay CE completely without the Commerce-Stuff?  We really don't like to have so much unused stuff inside Liferay - So are there easy ways to keep Liferay "smaller" than such bundle?

Hi Fredi, you can remove Commerce by removing Liferay CE Commerce - Liferay CE Commerce - API.lpkg and Liferay CE Commerce - Liferay CE Commerce - Impl.lpkg in osgi/marketplace and by deleting osgi/state

Congrats! :-)

 

I couldn't install the last two releases on Windows 10 and filed an issue about it here:

https://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-119483

 

The issue is still open and I didn't find it in the Fixes and Known Issues above.

 

That's why currently I don't dare to try it again on Windows 10.

 

Does anybody know more about this?