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RE: Making Liferay mainstream
Hi guys,
I must confess I'm still digesting Brian Chan's talk about the way forward and the goal that bothers me most is "increasing the community 100x". I'm all for it but... how?
We've talked a lot about the "developer experience", and it's still not enough. But we must also take care of the business users, and I believe it's being done with the many improvements in the product. Sill, one important barrier seems to be neglected: the first access to the product.
It's a pity the wedeploy project has closed, since it would be a nice way to have an instant demo/trial for the smaller user. Anyway, there's lots of people who want to try Liferay on their systems - and that goal is not easy to the average user.
Therefore, I'd like to suggest that some effort should be put on an installer that would include all the basic companianions: jdk, libreoffice, mariadb, external elastic. This installer should allow a non-technical users to try Liferay on their Mac, Windows or Linux. I know that docker is the fashionable way but I think that for many prospect users, this is still not an easy option.
As a cherry on top, we should get rid of the tomcat console and provide a nicer interface to the server monitoring. ;-)
HTH
Fernando
I must confess I'm still digesting Brian Chan's talk about the way forward and the goal that bothers me most is "increasing the community 100x". I'm all for it but... how?
We've talked a lot about the "developer experience", and it's still not enough. But we must also take care of the business users, and I believe it's being done with the many improvements in the product. Sill, one important barrier seems to be neglected: the first access to the product.
It's a pity the wedeploy project has closed, since it would be a nice way to have an instant demo/trial for the smaller user. Anyway, there's lots of people who want to try Liferay on their systems - and that goal is not easy to the average user.
Therefore, I'd like to suggest that some effort should be put on an installer that would include all the basic companianions: jdk, libreoffice, mariadb, external elastic. This installer should allow a non-technical users to try Liferay on their Mac, Windows or Linux. I know that docker is the fashionable way but I think that for many prospect users, this is still not an easy option.
As a cherry on top, we should get rid of the tomcat console and provide a nicer interface to the server monitoring. ;-)
HTH
Fernando
Hey Fernando,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Brian's talk. You are absolutely right that 100x is a super-ambitious goal and it will require the effort from a lot of people inside Liferay and in the wider community. You are also 100% right that part of achieving that will be to grow a community of users, not just developers. In fact the plan that we have in mind includes the following three phases:
1. Improve the community for existing members: better communication tools, quicker feedback loops
2. Expand the community to a wider community of developers, for example being more inclusive for the largely growing frontend community
3. Expand the community to be inclusive and friendly for non-technical end users. These end users may not be using the Liferay platform as it is, but rather solutions based on Liferay, with a specific purpose. So it might make sense to create sub-communities per solution type.
We also believe that it's necessary for the 3rd step, but also useful for the first two to facilitate the time it takes to try out the product. For the technical audience we have been working on facilitating it through Docker images (which have other great uses and benefits). For end users, we will rely on DXP Cloud, which is the evolution of Wedeploy.
Looking forward for your participation in the community!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Brian's talk. You are absolutely right that 100x is a super-ambitious goal and it will require the effort from a lot of people inside Liferay and in the wider community. You are also 100% right that part of achieving that will be to grow a community of users, not just developers. In fact the plan that we have in mind includes the following three phases:
1. Improve the community for existing members: better communication tools, quicker feedback loops
2. Expand the community to a wider community of developers, for example being more inclusive for the largely growing frontend community
3. Expand the community to be inclusive and friendly for non-technical end users. These end users may not be using the Liferay platform as it is, but rather solutions based on Liferay, with a specific purpose. So it might make sense to create sub-communities per solution type.
We also believe that it's necessary for the 3rd step, but also useful for the first two to facilitate the time it takes to try out the product. For the technical audience we have been working on facilitating it through Docker images (which have other great uses and benefits). For end users, we will rely on DXP Cloud, which is the evolution of Wedeploy.
Looking forward for your participation in the community!
Growing the community must come with listening to the community.
These forums are for the elite. What you should do is embrace services like uservoice.com.
We're telling you that the changes that are being made are making DXP harder to use for the average user and for at least a year there we were stonewalled by a scripted response about calculated risks. You're upgrading users to versions of Liferay that are not complete and are in constant flux with extreme feature destabilization. Training can't keep up. Patching all those versions of the system is going to be challenging.
By the time we learn Liferay it's already out of date and this is self imposed by Liferay's current crisis of technology selection. How do we know that Senna.js isn't going to be deprecated (it should be, there are constant issues with style caching and all kinds of page related issues due to Senna). There is constant churn on front end so if you're hoping to win over a bunch of front end devs, you're constantly changing the goal posts on those folks and you're going to catch flack from them.
Can we trust that web content isn't going to be deprecated? Features are being removed without consultation and so you have to flip flop taking features away, putting them back. In general the platform is disrupting itself, it's not stable, the goal posts are constantly shifting and you're not putting resources into things that matter to UX like Alloy Editor (or even going with TinyMCE which would be the smart play).
I see talented Java well qualified developers come on board around me and struggle with Liferay implementation. I'm not going to say the challenge can't be overcome, but the challenge in working with Liferay as a technology is extremely frustrating and time consuming. Which is not what business want, they don't want their teams wasting hours trying to debug something to find it's something Liferay refused to fix 5 years ago or a feature request was ignored.
I say I work with Liferay and people say "who?" "what's that?". Brian's video was needed.
These forums are for the elite. What you should do is embrace services like uservoice.com.
We're telling you that the changes that are being made are making DXP harder to use for the average user and for at least a year there we were stonewalled by a scripted response about calculated risks. You're upgrading users to versions of Liferay that are not complete and are in constant flux with extreme feature destabilization. Training can't keep up. Patching all those versions of the system is going to be challenging.
By the time we learn Liferay it's already out of date and this is self imposed by Liferay's current crisis of technology selection. How do we know that Senna.js isn't going to be deprecated (it should be, there are constant issues with style caching and all kinds of page related issues due to Senna). There is constant churn on front end so if you're hoping to win over a bunch of front end devs, you're constantly changing the goal posts on those folks and you're going to catch flack from them.
Can we trust that web content isn't going to be deprecated? Features are being removed without consultation and so you have to flip flop taking features away, putting them back. In general the platform is disrupting itself, it's not stable, the goal posts are constantly shifting and you're not putting resources into things that matter to UX like Alloy Editor (or even going with TinyMCE which would be the smart play).
I see talented Java well qualified developers come on board around me and struggle with Liferay implementation. I'm not going to say the challenge can't be overcome, but the challenge in working with Liferay as a technology is extremely frustrating and time consuming. Which is not what business want, they don't want their teams wasting hours trying to debug something to find it's something Liferay refused to fix 5 years ago or a feature request was ignored.
I say I work with Liferay and people say "who?" "what's that?". Brian's video was needed.
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