Blogs

Time for another community roundup!  It's been far too long since the last one, and as usual a lot has been happening in and around our community.  I hope everyone has had a good beginning to the new year, and will find some interesting and useful items below.  Warm up your clickers, and read on!

• Slides and recordings from last year's autumn Liferay Symposiums can be found on the landing pages for the North America, Europe, Spain, and Italy symposiums.  You may also be interested in the news reported from the symposia, or the awards (my favorite part - recognizing awesome community contributions!).
• If you rely on Customizable Pages within Liferay, you may find this tidbit from Bin very useful - how to allow users to customize pages, but not too much :)
• As you know, last year we began the Community Verifier team, to help verify existing issues in Liferay, and clean up our JIRA database of backlogged issues. Once again we are taking a run at the backlog, with a leaderboard and some prizes! If interested, join up in this thread.
• Thank-yous go to our awesome 2012 Q3 and Q4 top contributors:  Prakash Khanchandani, Victor Zorin, Jignesh Vachhani, Jan Geißler, Aniceto P Madrid, and David Kubitza!  These members gave a lot of virtual sweat over the last 6 months!  If you see them about, be sure to give them some gratitude!
• After a brief hiatus, Radio Liferay has continued, with episodes featuring Jim Hinkey from the Liferay Knowledge Management team, Sam Kong on Security, and most recently the man himself (Olaf) on Liferay's well hidden features.  Spice up your daily commute with gems from our community rock stars!
• We have had a lot of interest in new user groups recently.  Since the last roundup, we now have groups in Southern California, Colorado Springs, Australia, Japan, Montreal, Poland, and Sweden.  In addition, several user group founders contributed to a Presentation Template, providing a set of nice-looking and relevant slides to use in creating and giving presentations at community meetups.
• Notable user groups with recent activity include India, Montreal, Netherlands, Japan, and SoCal. Also, check out the UK User Group's recent meetup reports.  They are using Social Office for the group site, and it's looking good!
• A community Ruby Gem to create and manage Liferay projects?  Yes, please!
• The Liferay Marketplace is now fully armed and operational. Several notable apps have been published, such as Xtivia's Carousel Portlet, Permeance's Documents and Media Downloader, and Neurones' Property Search Portlet.  Here's a list of all of them, including Liferay's apps.
• From the releases desk: Liferay Portal 6.1 CE GA3 continues to bake in the oven. Several issues related to PACL have been fixed, hopefully making it possible to publish even more apps on the Marketplace.  Liferay Portal 6.2 is also under active development.  The latest Milestone release (Milestone 4) is undergoing community testing. Watch the Release Dashboard for updates!
• The Liferay Faces team has been busy since the acquisition of portletfaces.org - check out the latest release, and Neil's interview with Kito Mann, and don't miss the latest release!
• Nice tip from Snig on how to get rid of Alfresco Share navigation headers when using it with Liferay. Thanks, Snig!
• Tomas shows us how to run Liferay's built-in unit and integration tests. Of course these are run whenever someone commits, but it's nice to run it for your own projects as well.
• You may have noticed that when you are filing issues at issues.liferay.com, the ticket type New Feature and Improvement are gone, replaced by a single Feature Request ticket type.  More to come on this, but this is the start of a cool new Community Ideation process we've wanted for a long time, allowing requests to bubble up via socializing of ideas, voting, commenting, etc.  Good things ahead!
• Accessibility is not trivial, and Liferay has gone to great lengths to make the platform accessible.  Watch Julio navigate a Liferay site blindfolded!
• AlloyUI has had a storied past with Liferay.  With the launch of version 2.0, it has a new look and feel, a fantastic website, improved documentation, and much more. There's even a new #alloyui IRC channel on FreeNode!
• You probably saw this, but Milen made some really cool eye candy and shows you the activity in Liferay's source base.  
• Fun fact of the day: "Liferay, the most popular Java-based content management system, has increased its user base by 44.3% in the last year."  Link.
• Bitergia has done an interesting analysis of our open source community, looking at Git and JIRA data over the last few years. Of course, the total activity is ramping up as Liferay grows and is used more and more, but more interesting are the quantiles graphs - showing roughly how long it took to resolve tickets opened in a given month.  These and other kinds of metrics are constantly being monitored and used to improve the effectiveness of our open source community.  Look for additional efforts in the future!
• A Liferay and OSGi combination is a quasi-nirvana state that we are steadily approaching.  Check out Miguel's slides from the Spain Symposium for a brief glimpse into this promising future for modularity in Liferay!  As an example, check out shell-level access with Gogo. I can't wait to ssh into my running Liferay and fool around!
• The Liferay website underwent an upgrade to 6.1 EE last month.  The site itself didn't change much, but the web team can now concentrate on an information redesign (including our beloved community site!).  Don't worry, your favorite stuff will continue to work as usual!  But better!
• XMLPortletFactory continues to add awesomeness thanks to its community of developers, and now developers can easily integrate their custom actions with Liferay's Activity Framework.  I continue to bang on the "unappreciated feature drum" when discussing Social activities within Liferay!
• Tabbed and paginated search results with no javascript.  Thanks Amit!
• IRC traffic on #liferay has been steadily increasing - at one point last week, we had over 40 people in the chatroom, a record for Liferay. Kudos to all of you who are contributing to our little group!
• Nick shows us how to use the popular Twitter Bootstrap framework to build responsive layouts within a Liferay site.  Well done!
• Jorge from Liferay has a remarkable series of posts on Liferay's internal architecture.  The first 5 parts are:  Overview, Services Layer, Web Services, Caching, and Service Builder.  This is a great reference for any new or experienced Liferay developer.
• NightHacking on Liferay, with Sampsa.  Enough said!
• We in the community are serious about security.  With the formation of the Community Security Team last year, we have a better way of educating developers and providing source and binary patches for security issues.  In addition, there seems to be a renewed interest in documenting all the ways of hardening Liferay.  Here's a nice post describing how to test for vulnerabilities, and how to protect against them.  There's also a wiki page that shows you additional security best practices.
• There have been many awesome blog posts and wiki updates, and we try to keep everyone up to date monthly via the Community Pulse newsletter.  If you wish to receive this, sign up here.
• If you're attending EclipseCon, Portal Tech Days, Congres Intranet, JAX, Gartner PCC, KCDC, Community Leadership Summit, OSCON, or JavaOne this year, please.. stop by and say hi!

That's all I have for you today. Until next time (and hopefully such a time isn't that far out in the future next time!).