5.1.0, out!

I want to give a quick update regarding 5.1.0, released this morning.

Dropping the RC

Now that the JSR 286 specification has been officially approved, we can drop the "RC" portion from our release. Even though 5.0.0 RC, 5.0.1 RC were production quality, they were labeled as such because the JSR 286 guidelines state that we can't go final until the specification is approved.

Contributions from Sun

The Sun portal teams is making many contributions -- the Open Portal Container has been fully integrated into Liferay. The Sun team is also fixing many bugs and is really giving our development effort a huge lift. Some things to look forward to from the Sun team: WSRP 2.0 Producer / Consumer Integration, SAW workflow, and a presence engine. Keep up the great work guys!

Plugins and Themes

Over the next few days we will be updating all the plugins, portlets, layouts and themes to 5.1.0.

Noteworthy Features

  • Roles-based Access Control – We implemented a new permissioning algorithm which limits assignment of permissions to Roles. Other objects like Users, Groups, User-Groups and Organizations will not be available during permission assignment. Rather Roles are assigned to those instead. This significantly reduces the cost of assigning permissions and performing permission checks, delivering a huge performance boost.
  • Scheduled Staging and Remote Staging – This allows for a more nimble and flexible process of data transfer whereby groups of data, as specified by the user, in a particular site (ie, communities or organizations) can be sent to remote servers in the same physical machine, the same portal instance (JVM), or to servers that are geographically dispersed. The data import process is flexible enough to take care of various use cases for handling the imported data. Essentially this feature simplifies and speeds up the data transfer process while providing transactional security in its use of logic for handling how data should be inserted into the remote systems. Remote publishing also allows for the scheduling of both data transfers as well as data reversion
  • Announcements/Alerts are two portlets that can be used to broadcast messages to a list of users within a known scope. Essentially, they provide a mass messaging engine similar to a "news letter" or one-way messaging. Please see Architect, Ray Auge’s blog entry for more information
  • Alerts Portlet – This portlet allows administrators to create customizable alerts for users.
  • Alert Management and User Alert Configuration – Users can individually configure how each "type" of alert is delivered to them: SMS (optional), Email (optional), web (not optional). There are also more types that are configurable in the portal properties.
  • Integration with the latest jQuery and jQuery UI components
  • Scheduling Engine Upgrade – In 5.1, the internal scheduling engine was refactored SOA service.
  • Search Engine Upgrade – SOLR has been added as a search engine option in addition to Lucene. Other implementations are pluggable.
  • Asynchronous messaging and light weight message bus – Portlets can now communicate together in an SOA fashion within Liferay without having to use a full ESB.
  • User Group Page templates – Administrators are now allowed to create template pages (e.g. default portlets on a page, layout, theme).
  • New Mail Portlet – Performance and scalability enhancements have been made, as well as support for multiple accounts.
  • Groupwise Portlets – The Novell Groupwise Portlets have been verified for this release
  • And of course, a ton of bugs have been fixed
     

Thanks to everyone involved. Enjoy :).

 

Blogs
Great!

The Scheduled Staging and Remote Staging as well as simplified Role-based Access Control have been on my wishlist for long. I'll start testing them as soon as possible.
great job,
I like a lot the Integration with the latest jQuery and jQuery UI components and the new funcionality of Announcements/Alerts's.
I am going to test now emoticon
Hi Michael,

Congrats with this new version which has a lot of new promising things. One of the things I'm dying to try is the new permission algorithm but this doesn't seem to work with an existing database. Do you know which settings should be changed to let existing users use the new algorithm?

When you use the new algorithm right now, it's always showing this message: "You're not allowed to view this page".
There aren't upgrade scripts available to transition existing users yet, which is why the new old permission algorithms are still available. We'll be adding these migration scripts / instructions shortly.
Hey guys, for those interested here are three wiki articles that might be of interest for those looking into testing this new release:

http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/community/wiki/-/wiki/Main/New+Features+in+Liferay+Portal+v5.1

http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/community/wiki/-/wiki/Main/Quick+Installation+Instructions

http://wiki.liferay.com/index.php/Upgrade_Instructions_from_5.0_to_5.1
I am new to liferay .....actually moving from preproduction
to production environment seems a difficult task ..unlike other web application where we can deploy the war on the production server .....as Liferay also stores its portlet's information in db so how do move to production server in a easy way ,more so bcos deployment on production server may be taken up by a third party.....so is there a easy way out.
CMS Publishing issue:

1. we have an staging server where we want to setup our website using LEP CMS, we would like to create articles,setup pages,create themes,customize portlets to our needs.

Once this is ready we copy the staging version to production server, our live website for the outside world.1st time everything is fine.

But after that ,if we need to add new articles and setup new pages ,its cumbersome to publish the same to production as we need to synch our staging version to live website without copying it again because we have public account creation and other features.we use mysql dump to move the database from staging to production server for first time.

Page setups can be exported from page settings to productions but if we have any new articles,this will not be moved as its in the staging server database only.

This is not current possible under LEP 4.0.0,mysql 5.0 linux environment. (This should be not be a problem)

Please let me know how is liferay.com website and your other client locations are been solved for similar problems, I am sure everyone should be using staging server for this kind of website management.

Any kind of help,suggestion would help me to think and live with current version ofr LEP, I have setup this an I am running my websites for last 1 year please help.