Liferay Portal 6.1 Release Candidate Now Available

Liferay is proud to announce that the Liferay 6.1 CE Release Candidate is available! [Download]

The Liferay product and engineering teams, in close concert with our awesome community, have spent many months getting the 6.1 release ready, and this is one of the final builds before it will be generally available. We are making this release in advance of the 6.1 GA release, in order to ferret out last minute issues, and get the great work that the teams have poured into this into your hands earlier.

New Stuff Since Beta-4

The community has been hard at work. Over 800 individual issues (bugs and improvements) have been resolved since Beta-4, and several new major and minor features make up 6.1. Ed Chung gave a great overview of these 6.1 themes and features at the East Coast Symposium. See my blog post regarding 6.1 Beta for a run-down of the major features in 6.1.  Other highlights in this RC include:

  • Setup Wizard - The first time you start Liferay, you are now presented with a final set of setup screens allowing you to configure the initial user, initial name of the instance, and (even more awesome) the ability to configure the database that Liferay uses.  
  • Mobile Device Rules - This has been delivered over various releases, but in the RC it is finally complete.  Mobile device rules allow you to configure sets of rules and use those rules to alter the behavior of the portal based on the device being used to access Liferay.  You can also access and evaluate rules through custom scripts.
  • Site Template Improvements - Another feature that's been there, but the linkage between a site template and the sites that derive from that template is now complete and functional.  You can create 100 sites based off a single template, and then modify something in the template and watch the changes automatically reflect in the sites that derive from the template.
  • Social Activity Improvements - Many improvements to Social Activity (formerly known as Social Equity).  You can see a description in the user's guide section on Social (note that the Liferay User Guide is still a work in progress!).
  • JSON Web Service Docs - Dynamic documentation is now generated for the new JSON Web Services feature.  Simply access http://localhost:8080/api/jsonws to get online documentation for the REST-like JSON Web Services, as well as a simple test harness for accessing services.  Also note that tunnel-web has been integrated into the portal and is no longer a separate web app (But the old paths that used /tunnel-web/ will continue to work and be mapped to /api).
  • ... And more :)

Downloads

The release candidate is available on our downloads page.  The additional files that some will need (for example, for developers) are listed on the RC Additional Files page.

Documentation

Our documentation continues to improve. With the help of the community, our end user, administrator, and developer documentation have all improved tremendously. While the final documentation has not yet been published (it will be published with the GA release), its open source nature means you can take a look at the development, and even contribute to the "code". If there is a specific new feature you are interested in learning about, you are encouraged to use any of the myriad avenues through which the community supports its constituents, or you can just give the RC build a try today!

Bug reporting

If you experience issues with this RC release, and believe it to be a bug in the product, you are encouraged to file a report at issues.liferay.com. There is a specific release to denote in the Affects Version/s field: 6.1.0 RC. The issue will be triaged, and if it has a big enough impact, will be fixed for the final GA release.  Note that only showstopper bugs (insecurity, crashes, severe memory "leak", data corruption, or major loss of functionality with no viable workaround)  will be fixed leading up to the GA release.

Upgrading to 6.1

As this is still not the final release, you should not use this unsupported release in a production environment. However, it is a good way to test that your eventual upgrade will succeed with the minimum of fuss. Several of our BugSquad members have already successfully upgraded their customized Liferay 6.0 environments to the early 6.1 builds, and this build gives you a chance to do the same.

Going Forward

As we approach the final GA release, there may be additional Release Candidate builds to fix any last minute issues. As always, you are encouraged to participate and contribute to the project, and we hope you enjoy this sneak peek!

0