The Learning Curve, Chapter 5 - Community Resources

Are you new to Liferay? Found Liferay and want to know what it can do for you? Or are you with Liferay and still remember the time when you were new and unexperienced? Where did you come from and what was the biggest problem you faced? Can you ever learn enough? And how do you keep up with the current trends and new features?

A platform as big as Liferay spans several technologies and areas of best practices that are beneficial to know of. Nobody can know everything - there's always a learning curve. At the beginning, it's quite steep. Some argue that it's flattening the more you know. Some argue that it gets steeper: The more you know, the more you know what you don't know.

This is chapter 5 in a series of blog articles. See below this article for links to the other chapters.

Top 10 resources, lazy linking

Back in August, when I published chapter 4 of this series, I announced chapter 5 to be about Community Resources. In the meantime (actually, also quite a while ago), James has done a great job putting exactly this together, so I won't repeat him, just point you to his article Top 10 ways to keep up with the Liferay Community. Follow all his links and suggestions, then come back here.

11: But wait, there's more

One more resource though, which has been released (in beta) since James wrote his article: Our new documentation home on dev.liferay.com went live and you can find a lot of relevant information there. This site is meant to replace most of the documentation that you currently find on www.liferay.com - most specifically the Wiki, which got a bit outdated.

Note that you can see a lot of "Edit on github" links on dev.liferay.com: You can contribute and send pull requests without ever installing git or understanding the details of distributed version systems. Just click the link, edit and send in your suggestions.

12: Meet & Greet

Another additional item, directly from the current symposium season: Meeting the community is awesome. I've been lucky to have the opportunity to ruin my voice in several locations around the world (it's typically been really noisy) and all the conversations were extremely inspiring. I've learnt a lot, got lots of ideas and met interesting people - and I got the same feedback from many others. As I've said multiple times, I'm quite lucky to be able to say that events like those are actually work. From personal experience I can tell you that it's even more awesome once you made yourself known to the community, e.g. in the forums or here in the blogs. Having some reputation (and a recognizable portrait photo) and being recognized for your contributions over the time is an even better conversation starter than distributing free drink vouchers ;)

I tell you that to tell you this: Don't miss next year's event season. It's a great way to get and share ideas, knowledge, experience and feedback.

That's it?

Of course not. You'll find several personal blogs, Google+ and other resources about Liferay. Typically linked from all over, so it shouldn't be too hard to find them.

Learning is a personal experience. We have resources for the reader, the listener, the in-person-education-learner and the watcher. Some even in multiple flavors. Whatever your preferred way of learning is, you'll be able to find it. Whatever way you want to do to gain reputation or increase your knowledge: Do it. Whatever I've been missing: Add pointers in the comments. I might continue or update the series in future - for now I'll put it on hold.

And thanks again for all the inspiring conversations during the many events this year. Keep it up.