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Today Liferay released the next version of its flagship software: Liferay Portal 7.0 CE! 
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After many months of hard work from the Liferay product and engineering teams along with the aid of the awesome Liferay community, it is my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Liferay Portal 7.0 CE.  Liferay Portal 7.0 CE is an amazing release packed with many new features and enhancements.  Read on for more!

Release Nomenclature

Following Liferay's versioning scheme established in 2010, this release is Liferay 7.0 CE GA1.  The internal version number is 7.0.0 (i.e. the first release of 7.0).  Future CE releases of 7.0 will be designated GA2, GA3, .. and so on.  See below for upgrade instructions from 6.1, 6.0, and 5.x.

Downloads

You can find the 7.0 release on the usual downloads page.  If you need additional files (for example, the source code, or dependency libraries), visit the additional files page.

Source Code

As Liferay is an open source project, many of you will want to get at its guts. The source is available as a zip archive on the downloads page, or on its home on GitHub. Many community contributions went into this release, and hopefully many more in future releases! If you're interested in contributing, take a look at our contribution page.

Support Matrix

Liferay's general policy is to update our support matrix for each release, testing Liferay against newer major releases of supporting operating systems, app servers, browsers, and databases (we regularly update the bundled upstream open source libraries to fix bugs or take advantage of new features in the open source we depend on). 

Liferay 7.0 CE was tested extensively for use with the following Application/Database Servers: 

Liferay CE Application Servers:

• Apache Tomcat 8.0 with Java 8
• Wildfly 10.0 with Java 8

Liferay CE Databases:

• HSQLDB 2 (only for demonstration, development, and testing)
• MySQL 5.6
• MariaDB 10
• PostgreSQL 9.3

New Features Summary

• Modularity inside: The #1 feature of Liferay 7 is not a feature, but a way to empower you to build more powerful, adaptable, lightweight and innovative systems for the digital world that is coming. Liferay 7's functionality has been modularized into hundreds of modules, allowing you to use what you need for each project and take away the rest, giving you an extensibility unthinkable until now, and a much more elegant development model. And all of this based on rock solid standards of the OSGi family. 
   
• New Forms Experience: Liferay 7 includes a brand new application that allows defining and publishing advanced dynamic forms. The forms can have complex multi-column layouts and span several pages. They can be published in any Liferay site just by dropping the form into a page or also Google Forms style, by providing a URL that links directly to a full page form. Many field types are included out of the box and custom types can be added by deploying custom modules. Forms can also be integrated with Liferay's workflow system to submit forms through a predefined process. 
   
• Optimized Content Authoring: As content management systems get more complicated and get more options, the more complex writing content might get. But it doesn't have to. We have rethought the authoring experience to let the authors, from web content to blogs, focus on writing great content, while still having available the full power that Liferay's applications provide when they are really necessary. All this thanks to our brand new WYSIWYG editor: Alloy Editor. In addition to this, many small improvements have been added such as the ability to organize web content in folders, visual content diffs, reuse of content structures and templates across sites, and more.
   
• Geolocate any content: Liferay 7 provides out of the box the ability to geolocate all web content, data lists, documents & media. It also provides the ability to leverage the power of Liferay's Asset Publisher to create lists of geolocalized content and publish them in a Map.
   
• Advanced modern sites easier than ever: Nowadays sites are more complex, dynamic and visually stunning than ever before. Liferay 7 contains a series of improvements  to provide more power to site administrators to create modern sites faster. As a proof of what is now possible Liferay now includes out of the box a new site template showcasing a modern product site, leveraging Liferay 7's new features such as application decorators, new application display templates, sets of pages and more. Additional site templates & themes will be delivered in the next few months in the marketplace.
   
• Improved blogs, forum and wiki: When you need to host your own blog it's hard to compete with the simplicity of the online platforms like wordpress.com or Medium, but Liferay 7 makes it much easier. Beautiful and streamlined by default but with all of Liferay's power underneath. Our beloved Forum and Wiki applications have also seen incremental improvements targeted towards encouraging usage and engagement.
   
• Easier to use staging, even for the most advanced scenarios: Publishing from staging to live is now as easy as clicking one button. And for more advanced publishing scenarios, it's now possible to save advanced configurations and reuse them to ensure successful publications every time.
  
   
• New image, file and media selector: Whether you are writing a web content, a blog entry, a wiki page, … being able to select an already uploaded picture, upload one now, or even take a picture or video right now to be added to your content is becoming more common than ever before. Liferay's new media selector has been designed to make these common operations easy. Not only that, it's highly extensible so that new sources of media such as google, flickr, youtube, ... can be added to any application using the selector.
   
• Faster loading and reduced bandwidth usage: Liferay 7 provides a much faster perceived performance for its users thanks to a new technology that automatically converts all applications (even custom ones) as well as the navigation across pages of a site into Single Page Applications. This means that only the pieces of a page that are necessary are loaded avoiding full page refreshes, reducing bandwidth usage, load times and rendering time in the browser. 
   
• Stunning visual and usability improvements in all of the out of the box applications: The User Experience in Liferay 7 has improved so much that we have even created a new design language along the way, Lexicon. You will notice its presence in the stunning new look of all of Liferay's applications which have redesigned to make the best use of the screen real estate for screens of all sizes, make its features easier to find and learn and perform tasks faster than ever before. Liferay 7 provides an implementation of Lexicon as a CSS framework based on Bootstrap that can be used as well for third party applications to achieve the same effect with much less effort than ever before.
   
• Optimized product navigation: A new menu provides a unified way for administrators and registered users to access all administrative and personal applications from a single place, leaving all the screen real estate available for the site navigation and decorations. The product navigation is fully extensible to allow customizing it for any need.
   
• Better developer experience: By leveraging modularity and state of the art tooling, developing for Liferay 7 is going to be easier and more powerful than ever before. We are embracing Gradle and Maven and creating plugins and some additional command line and Eclipse tools on top. 
   
• Infrastructure improvements: Many improvements have been incorporated at the core platform level, including replacing Lucene with ElasticSearch as the default search engine (providing better monitoring, tuning and clustering), JAX-RS infrastructure to build custom and secured RESTful Web Services, a device manager, a new Configuration API to make any application configurable with less effort, a brand new data upgrade framework, etc.

And more: there is much more than we can list here since this release has over 1750 new features and improvements. Not only that, in the next months we plan to leverage modularity to keep delivering features on top of the base Liferay 7 platform, such as a new image editor that will be integrated into Liferay's Documents and Media and the Image Selector.

Documentation

The Liferay Documentation Team has been hard at work updating all of the documentation for the new release.  This includes updated (and vastly improved/enlarged) javadoc and related reference documentation, and and updated installation and development documentation can be found on the Liferay Developer Network. Our community has been instrumental in identifying the areas of improvement, and we are constantly updating the documentation to fill in any gaps.

Deprecated Plugins

Several plugins have been deprecated in Liferay 7 and will be available in the Marketplace as a labs application after the Liferay 7 Release.  The list of deprecated plugins are:

• Shopping Portlet
• Mail Portlet
• Invitation Portlet
• Software Catalog

Bug Reporting

As always, the project continues to use issues.liferay.com to report and manage bug and feature requests.  If you believe you have encountered a bug in the new release (shocking, I know), please be cognizant of the bug reporting standards and report your issue on issues.liferay.com, selecting the "7.0.0 CE GA1" release as the value for the "Affects Version/s" field.

Upgrading

Good news for those of you on 6.0 or prior! Liferay introduced the seamless upgrade feature with Liferay 6.1. Seamless upgrades allow Liferay to be upgraded more easily. In most cases, pointing the latest version of Liferay to the database of the older version is enough. There are some caveats though, so be sure to check out the Upgrading section on the Liferay Developer Network for more detail on upgrading to 7.0.

Getting Support

Support for Liferay 7.0 CE comes from the wonderful and active community, from which Liferay itself was nurtured into the enterprise offering it is today.  Please visit the community pages to find out more about the myriad avenues through which you can get your questions answered.

Liferay and its worldwide partner network also provides services, support, training, and consulting around its flagship enterprise offering, which is due to be released shortly after this CE release.

Also note that customers on existing releases such as 6.1 and 6.2 continue to be professionally supported, and the documentation, source, and other ancillary data about these releases will remain in place.

What's Next?

Of course we in the Liferay Community are interested in your take on the new features in Liferay 7.0.  Work has already begun on the next evolution of Liferay, based on user feedback and community ideas.  If you are interested in learning more about how you can get involved, visit the Liferay Community pages and dig in.

Kudos!

This release was produced by Liferay's worldwide portal engineering team, and involved many hours of development, testing, writing documentation, translating, testing some more, and working with the wider Liferay community of customers, partners, and open source developers to incorporate all sorts of contributions, both big and small. We are glad you have chosen to use Liferay, and hope that it meets or exceeds your expectations!

In addition to Liferay's engineering staff, a special thanks goes to the many open source developers who participated in the Community Expedition who volunteered their time and energy to help with the release, whether it was bugfixing, idea generation, documentation, translations, or other contribution that helped to improve this release.