Jorge Ferrer
With the recently released Liferay Portal 7.3 CE GA1, we are adopting a rolling release cycle for Liferay Portal CE. This means that we will have very frequent stable CE releases which will include new features, improvements, and bug fixes. This is what the new process looks like for 2020: After this cycle finishes, we will start again with the CE GA1 for the next...
Just in time to throw a big celebration we finally have achieved Beta status for Liferay 7! As mentioned in a previous blog entry, the criteria to meet Beta status is: Data upgrade finalized for all bundled applications: You can now start testing the upgrades from your Liferay installations to Liferay 7. We really need your help here since there are so many different...
You probably have not had time to digest Alpha 3 yet, but here we are again with a new preliminary release: Liferay 7 Alpha 4 is out! This release fixes 82 bugs resolved since Alpha 3 and adds 31 small improvements: More portlets getting Lexicon-based designs (including Site Memberships, this time for real), several functional improvements to Forms, notifications in the product...
Here we are again, following our bi-weekly releases plan with our third alpha release. We are still working hard to reach beta status as soon as possible and I would like to use this opportunity to explain what our criteria is and how our focus on high quality is driving this release more than ever. But before that, let me brag a bit about our hard work during these past two...
We continue our path towards releasing Liferay 7 with a new alpha release that focuses on fixing bugs and small improvements. This release fixes 254 bugs since Alpha 1 and adds +100 small improvements. During this time we have also had the opportunity to present Liferay 7 twice: first in Germany during DevCon and later in Spain during the Spain Symposium. We are super...
As announced in my last blog post, the period of our milestones has finished and we are getting into the launch field with the release of Liferay 7 alpha 1. We appreciate all the feedback from the people downloading the milestones and participating in the Community Expedition program. If you haven’t sent your feedback yet, it’s never too late to make Liferay the best fit possible for...
If you thought August was being a bit boring in terms of news, here we come to spice it up with yet another new milestone release on our road to Liferay 7. And it’s not just any release. This will be the last milestone release of the series. Yup, you’ve heard right; the next release will be our first alpha release already. So this is a great moment to take a look at the ongoing work...
Together with the summer season and the sunny days the sixth milestone has come too. We are getting closer to the end of the year, and this will be one of the last milestones so all development teams are working on finishing some of the features and improvements that have been months in the works to get everything ready for the alpha/beta cycles. This milestone comes very shortly...
Here at Liferay we don’t stop and we just took out of the oven the fifth Milestone of the upcoming Liferay 7 release. If the previous milestone marked the beginning of the Community Expedition program which had a great success, with this one we would like to encourage even more people to get involved and provide their ideas as we get closer to the beta cycle. Just follow the link...
Did you like what you saw in previous milestones? You didn’t feel there was enough meat to be worth your time? Get ready for Milestone 4 which comes bundled with many improvements and new features. Not only that, with this release we are launching the Liferay 7 Community Expedition program which will allow intrepid adventurers to work with the Liferay developers to find bugs and...
It’s the end of the year season and most programmers take a few days of to spend time with family and/or friends and of course check out some new technologies. While we know there are many exciting new techs to choose from, we wanted you to have at least one more option to choose from by making available a new and shiny milestone of Liferay 7. This is a great opportunity to see the...
It's been around 2 months since Milestone 1 and we are now ready for the second public deliverable of the ongoing Liferay Development: Liferay 7 Milestone 2. As usual it can be downloaded in Sourceforge’s downloads page. If you prefer to get them from a Maven repo you can get it from Liferay’s maven repo. If you prefer to get it from GitHub you can use...
The word is out in Twitter, we have released the first development milestone release of Liferay 7. This is a call for really adventurous developers to try it out and give us your feedback. Here are the answers to the questions you may have about the release. So… is Liferay 7 close to being released? Nope. Our current thinking is that Liferay 7 will be released...
Continuing with my series of "New in 6.2" entries, today I want to put the focus on a more technical aspect of the new version: the fact that it provides support for Twitter Bootstrap out of the box. Some of the benefits of this are: Themes built for Liferay can be based on Bootstrap themes. And there are quite a few of them. Portlet developers can use the bootstrap...
In my last blog entry I explained the thought process we followed to improve the Dockbar. What some of you may have noticed is that I skipped talking about three elements that used to be in the left side of the dockbar in 6.1: So, what happened to them? These options where part of the overall work that we have done to provide a proper Information Architecture for all...
Hey guys, The 6.2 release is almost out and I want to use this opportunity to talk about some of the improvements we have done to the dockbar. For those newer to Liferay, the Dockbar is the nick name for the bar that appears at the top of the screen and provides personal and administration options to users. In 6.1, this bar looked like this: Although, of course it is...
Liferay's architecture is pretty lean, but there are lots of things to learn about it. What would you be interested in learning? I'm doing a talk next week in Liferay's DevCon in Berlin about Advanced Liferay Architecture. I will also deliver it at the Spain Symposium and the North America Symposium. This presentation will be a follow up of last year's presentation about Liferay's...
The 6.2 release is very very close. Those who have talked with the core team about it know that we have been working hard since the 6.1 release to increase the predictability of the releases and at the same time keep increasing the product quality. You have probably already seen that we have released 6 milestones during this time and 2 betas recently. My goal with this blog entry is...
In my previous post I convered the reasons why we decided to streamline the administration UIs of Liferay and in the process review the usability and design of the Control Panel. In that post I already covered two of the key decisions we made as part of this redesign: (1) Extract the "My Account" administration out of the Control Panel and (2) Extract "Site Administration"...
Hey guys, The 6.2 release is getting closer and closer, so after quite a few months without writing a blog entry I'd like to get back starting a new series I'm calling "New in 6.2". In this blog series I plan to blog about new features in the upcoming release and will try to explain our motivations, the challenges we faced and the reasons for the decisions we made. All in the Open...
Here I am again with another in the series about Liferay's architecture. If you haven't read them yet, the four previous entries covered: Overview, Services Layer, Web Services and Service Builder. This time I'm going to cover a very important concept: caching. In today's web, it's impossible for a web application to provide even good enough performance in the web unless it has a...
One of Liferay's "secret" ingredients, specially with regards to its architecture, is Service Builder. This is the tool that glues together all of Liferay's layers and that hides the complexities of using Spring or Hibernate under the hood. Service Builder was originally built when Liferay used EJBs for everything (in fact it's name back then was EJBBuilder). EJBs were actually...
It's taken a little longer than planned due to Liferay's annual company retreat and the engineering retreat we did along with it, but here I am with the third entry in the Liferay's Architecture blog series. I also plan to write a fourth one and schedule it for publication next week while I'm on vacation. My last entry explored how Liferay's code is organized around the...
Here I am again for a second entry on the series of Liferay Architecture. This time I'm going to talk a bit more about the services layer of Liferay. As can be seen in the architecture diagram with which I started this series, the services layer is at the core of Liferay Portal: The Services layer contains the great majority of the business logic for the portal platform and...
Hey guys, As you have already heard we have done quite a few symposiums during October, starting with the one in San Francisco, followed by Germany and finishing with Spain. And by the way, if you live in Italy and haven't had a chance to go to any of them, don't miss out the opportunity to attend the Liferay Italy Symposium this Friday. You will have an opportunity to meet many...
While many people have already find out by themselves I think it's about time to make it official: Liferay's source code is now at GitHub. That includes all of the projects: Liferay Portal Liferay Plugins Alloy UI Liferay Faces Liferay Docs Why the change? We had been talking for a long time about using a distributed version control system...
Hola a todos, Ya estoy por aquí de nuevo y como no podía ser de otra manera con buenos propósitos de escribir entradas mucho más a menudo. Temas de los que hablar no me van a faltar en los próximos meses con el lanzamiento de la versión 6.1, el marketplace, el roadmap de las siguientes versiones, ... Estos serán precisamente los temas en torno a los cuales girarán las...
Ayer se celebró en Barcelona el primer "Liferay Dream Day". Este evento fue posible gracias a nuestro partner iSoco, que cuenta con gran experiencia en actividades de innovación, y fue una gran experiencia para todos los que estuvimos allí. El evento contó con la participación de varios clientes seleccionados de toda España junto con nuestros...
Yesterday we held the first ever "Liferay Dream Day" event in Barcelona. This event was possible thanks to our partner iSoco who is highly specialized in innovation activities and it was an amazing experience for all of us. The event counted with the participation of selected key customers from around Spain along with our partners iSoco, B2B2000 and GMV...
One of the questions that comes up more often when I talk to community members, partners and customers is, should I use communities or organizations in my project? If you haven't asked yourself this question before, let me add some background. Liferay portal is known to have great multi-tenancy support. That means that you can have many independent sites within a single installation...
Hey guys, I'm not very active lately due to the great growth that we are experiencing in Spain and the increasing work associated to the upcoming new version, Liferay 6.1. The reason for this blog post is to announce some great news: The second edition of the Developer's Guide is now available at www.liferay.com/documentation The document is available online for browsing...
============================== English =============================== Liferay keeps growing and our office in Madrid is no exception. Because of this we are looking to incorporate 4 new employees for the following positions: Liferay Account Manager Liferay Core Engineer Liferay Support Engineer Liferay QA Engineer If you are a fan of Liferay and...
While the ability to have all of our official docs in HTML form and indexed is great, in some cases we all prefer a PDF version that can easily be printed or checked while offline. We've always had the PDF version of our guides available but after the redesign they weren't so visible any more, so some of you had been asking about them. As a result we've just applied an small...
One of the most interesting improvements of Liferay 6 for developers is that the plugin infrastructure has improved considerably. For example, the hook plugins are now much more powerful and allow customizing the platform in a very maintainable way. Also, the old extension environment has been moved inside the plugins SDK as what are known as Ext plugins. After publishing our new...
As you have probably already noticed we've just made public a quite large revamp of our documentation. This is the result of a project that has taken several months and has involved gathering feedback from many sources of Liferay's ecosystem, writing and improving documentation, improving the existing docs and developing tools to make them more easily available. But we don't want to...
Después de un año de pausa este año vuelve de nuevo la Open Source World Conference en Málaga. Después del gran éxito del Symposium en Madrid, nos hemos quedado con ganas de más y hemos pensado que sería una gran idea repetir varias de las charlas técnicas que preparamos para el symposium junto con algunas nuevas que prepararemos para la ocasión. En esta ocasión los organizadores...
Along with all the functional and architectural improvements of Liferay 6, we've also tried to improve our release process based on the feedback that we've received from the community and customers during the last releases. Let's start with the basics, here are some simple rules to interpret the meaning of a version: Versions consist of a three digit number. For example,...
This is the first post of what I hope will become a series of posts asking for feedback on some of the new features that will be including in Liferay 6. What we are hoping for right now is comments regarding issues from a usability or functional perspective. We'll be looking for ideas for improvements later, as part of the definition of the 6.1 roadmap, but right now our...
No se me ocurría un título mejor que simplemente "Gracias". Gracias en primer lugar a todos los que habéis hecho el primer Symposium en España una realidad, empezando por Carolina sin la que hubiera sido totalmente imposible este evento, a Natalia en la organización, a Julio, Juan, Alberto y Sergio por toda su ayuda y sus magníficas ponencias, a Brian y Paul por viajar desde EEUU...
First of all, a disclaimer for those of you who don't speak Spanish. I will keep writting most of my posts in English, but this one is about our very first Symposium in Spain so I thought it was a great occasion for my first post in Spanish :) Si, habéis leído bien (y posiblemente lo habréis visto en la portada de liferay.com), el próximo 20 de Abril tendrá lugar en Madrid el primer...
Tomorrow, Thursday March 18th, I'll be visiting Barcelona to participate in the event La Web Inteligente: estrategia, soluciones y tecnología para conseguir una experiencia Web diferencial. I'll be looking forward to meet all of you who will be attending.
Here I am once again, I still don't blog as much as I would like too but there are so many things happening around Liferay that it's hard to sit down and write. Our office in Madrid keeps growing with more customers, partners and new hires, we open new offices around the world, Gartner seems to like us even more every year :) and of course we have the Symposiums... 3 in a row this...
Mallorca is one of those places in the world that you have to visit. Like most places next to the the sea it provides a sense of calm that is very appreciated when you come from the busy Madrid. I had the pleasure of being there last week thanks to an invitation by one of our partners, IN2, who had organized an event about "Mission Critical Open Source Platforms". My talk was...
We've been working in the last few days with our partner VASS defining the best design for a very large customer who had the requirement of avoiding full page reloads when the users interact with a given application. The team at VASS had already decided to use Service Builder to save time developing the persistance layer and was looking for the best way to implement the frontend of...
As most readers will probably know, one of the most powerful characteristics of Liferay's portlets is the fact that when they are added to different communities or organizations (whenever I use the word community from now on it also applies to organizations) they act as completely independent portlets, each with it's own data. For example, if you have two communities, one called...
The new release of Liferay Portal is out and I think this is its best release ever. All of us who have been working hard within Liferay and the community to get it out are super excited, everybody we show it too also gets excited, and what is more important, the feedback from the very early adopters has been awesome. What is so special about this release? I think one of the key...
If you've been working with Liferay for a while this is probably an improvement that you will be excited about. If you are new to Liferay then this is a change you'll be even more excited about. So, what is it? In a few words it's a UI that allows administrating the complete portal, from 1 community to thousands of them, from users and organizations to documents, images, articles, ......
It's been a very long time since my last post but I promise I'll make up for it with a series of posts about the latest features we've been working on for the next releases of Liferay Portal. But first, I want to blog about a topic that I think will be of a lot of interest for Portal developers: how to optimize Liferay to make development faster. In other words...
Many of you probably already know how it's possible to preconfigure the personal pages of users by using some properties of the portal.properties file: default.user.private.layout.template.id=2_columns_ii default.user.private.layout.column-1=71_INSTANCE_OY0d,82,23,61 default.user.private.layout.column-2=11,29,8,19 Some versions ago Ray also added the possibility of specifying a...
Yes, we've finally done it!! Liferay's community wiki has been migrated from MediaWiki to Liferay's own wiki portlet. We are pretty excited about this because it brings a lot of benefits. To name a few: The wiki is now fully integrated in the liferay.com website, so it's easier for community members to navigate through all the sources of information. For example, visitors...
Inter Portlet Communication (IPC) is a hot topic nowadays. This was probably the most missed feature of the first version of the portlet spec (JSR-168), but has made it to the second version (JSR-286, supported since Liferay 5.0). Maybe this is the reason why more and more people are becoming interestind in IPC, and even in portlets in General. As I've mentioned in previous posts,...
A progress bar is one of the most useful widgets for a user interface when the user can perform lengthy tasks. Unfortunately, while it's a widget very often found in desktop applications it's not so common in web applications. The reason for this is that it's not so obvious how to implement them. In fact, not so many years ago I remember saying to a customer that it was not possible...
Several weeks ago we announced the compatibility of Liferay 5 with the final draft of the spec. and now it's been declared officially final. Thanks go to Stefan, the spec lead, for all his hard work during the last weeks dealing with legal and administrative stuff to make this possible. I recommend you all to download and read the spec, because it has many interesting additions:...
Until now when the user was in any place of the portal clicked the "Sign in" link he was shown a default portal login page. Of course it was already possible to create your own customized login page using the available portlets, but the user was not redirected there when clicking the "Sign in" button. After this improvement it is possible to let the portal know that a given...
This is a new feature I've been wanting to blog about for a while. It was inspired by a request from a customer who wanted to be able to store the different configurations of web forms and be able to later reuse them. For example, at some point there could be a form for "Contact Us", another for "Request for detailed information", another for "Inscription for event X", etc. Not all of...
Up until now the editor area of FCKEditor did not always correctly reflect the look&feel that the contents were going to have when published. The reason was that the theme CSS was not being applied within the editor area. With the help of Nate I've just fixed that so from now on, what you see will really be what you get. But this is just the beginning of a better integration. The...
We've been waiting for this moment for a long time. I've received this question by email, in person and through the message boards, lots of times... when will the Portlet 2.0 spec be ready?. Finally we have the good news, I just got an email from Stefan Hepper to the JSR-286 expert group mailing list announcing that the Portlet 2.0 specification has been approved (so it's very close...
I just came across a blog post with an example on how to create a drag & drop effect using jQuery UI. Looking at the code it surprises how easy it is. The whole JavaScript is around 17 lines of code, but but only around 9-10 of them are directly related to the drag functionality. But after hearing Paul talk about all the casuistics he was considering when implementing this...
As promised, I want to finish the review of the new features of the wiki portlet. This time I'm not going to write much and will let the screenshots speak for themselves:Diff view of changes betweeen versions. Here goes a feature that we've waited for for a long time: Click the button and you get: Nice, right? You have to thank Bruno for it. Subscriptions to changesIt's...
Ok, maybe the title is a bit pretentious but I have to say that I'm really excited with the results. I'm surprised myself with how much we've been able to do in so little time. IMHO after these improvements Liferay Wiki can be compared to the most known wiki products out there (proprietary or Open Source). Not only it's comparable to them in terms of wiki related functionalities but it...
Yesterday I received my first book bought at Lulu.com and I have to say that the whole process has been great. The price has been lower than the usual technical books I buy and I've had to wait much less than I usually wait when buying a book in on-line shops. Note that I have no relationship with Lulu.com at all, but I think when people do a good job they deserve being recognized for...
Happy new year everybody!! It's been a while since my last post and this will be a very short one. All I wanted to do is let everyone interested know that I'm working on improving the wiki again. After the latest changes there is been a renewed interest in Liferay's wiki and a company has agreed to sponsor some further improvements (let's give them a big thank you). After several...
One of the toughest parts of contributing to Liferay is that we are very strict with the coding and design style. We do this because we believe that keeping a very high level of consistency is what allows the product to keep evolving at maximum speed. Fortunately there are very smart people in the community that have been able to learn this rules just by looking at the code and they...
Determining the best strategy for doing releases is one of the hardest challenges of developing a software product. We get lot's of feedback related to it, although it's usually in the form of indirect comments or questions. Some very common examples are: "When are you going to release the next version? I really need feature X" "Another release? I just...
It's been a while since my last post, but here I'm at it again. This will be the first of a series of posts where I plan to write about the latest improvements to Liferay as we develope them. I will not only talk about those that I develop myself but also about those done by others if I see that they do not do it themselves. The end purpose is to keep everyone interested more aware of...
Last week Google announced OpenSocial with an impressive set of partners including Orkut (as expected), MySpace, iLike, Flixter, Oracle, .... There were companies that had their own social network, others that offered applications through the Internet and even companies that provide services and infrastructures. There's been a lot of blogging about whether this is Google's checkmate to...
My previous post had much more success that I had ever imagined, which is good because it means that there is a lot of interest in the community to have a better wiki portlet. Also one of my conclusions after reading the comments is that there is a renewed interest in Liferay's bundled wiki portlet. This purpose of this second post is to explain, and show with screenshots, a set of...
It's no big secret that Liferay's bundled wiki is one of the most often criticized. And I can understand it. For example, when you first add the portlet you get a view that looks nothing like a wiki and the only option available is adding a node: Hmmm... but what is a node? You may ask. If you go ahead and create a node, it doesn't improve a whole lot: Nodes are actually a...
We finally have a corporate blog! We had been talking about doing this for a long time and finally we've had the time to make the the necessary improvements to Liferay to make this possible. As part of these improvements we have two new portlets, the Recent Bloggers portlet and the Blogs Aggregator portlet. The former allows showing a list of the latest users of the portal (more on...