Liferay Portal website - Participate

Participate in an Open Source project? Meaning ... do what exactly?

The trouble with that phrase is that everyone puts their own meaning in it. Some will claim it’s not participation unless you write code. Others will claim that’s actually “contributing” (which IMHO is not less ambiguous word) and everything else is participation. For us, it’s simple - whatever you do to make our Open Source products better, counts.

But what can one actually do? This is what the new “Participate” section of Liferay Portal website aims to explain. It points you to all relevant resources and also provides some guidelines to follow. 

I will not spend too much time talking about reporting bugs, helping other people on forums/chat,  improving the docs or translating. Enough to say that should you have any doubts about how to do one of those things, we got you covered.

Here I would like to highlight 2 sections which are the outcome from DevRel facing its biggest challenge - how to make contributions simple and straightforward while at the same time keeping the internal development processes efficient.

Continuous feedback

When we announced the end of the Beta Program and its replacement by something we called “Continuous feedback”, we got all sorts of feedback - from generally approving to expressing deep disappointment. 

One of the bigger valid concerns was that without the Beta Program people will have a hard time tracking changes and thus respond to them. While the whole development is done in the public space (you can literally connect every line of code to a public JIRA issue) trying to catch up with all the changes and understand the decisions made could be overwhelming.

After long discussions with product management and engineering we came up with a process that we described on the brand new “Continuous feedback” pages. It boils down to 3 things:

We hope these pages will serve as a replacement for the Beta program. We worked hard to integrate them with  JIRA, blogs and message boards so we can show in one place aggregated information about the development progress. 

Contributing code to Liferay Portal

As most Open Source projects, we love when people contribute code. Well, when they contribute code that is good and tested and follows the best practices and is aligned with the roadmap and it’s not something that shouldn’t be a Marketplace plugin and … I think you get the point. 

Having high expectations is fine, provided the people are empowered to actually meet those expectations. Meanwhile, as it turns out, many people out there struggle to build Liferay Portal from source. This is why we now have “Fix a bug or contribute a new feature” pages which we hope soon will contain all the information that you may need to consider when you decide to contribute code to Liferay Portal.

Currently they focus on 3 fundamental things:

  • Building Liferay Source which provides great step by step instructions telling you how to build the product without having to spend hours waiting for download and compile tasks to finish
  • IDE Support which covers support in both Eclipse and IntelliJ
  • How the Source is Organized which aims to explain some basic assumptions and conventions about the source code structure.

So, if you ever wanted to fix a bug, improve a functionality or build your own feature, now you know how to start. Yes, we know it’s long road between that and getting your contribution accepted and merged into the product but trust us, we are working on that part too.


As always, I will now ask you to send your feedback in the comments below or by email (developer-relations@liferay.com) or in Slack. We can only improve if we know what needs improving! 

I wish you happy coding and many successful Liferay Portal powered projects!

 

Read more:

  1. New websites and new domains
  2. Liferay Portal website - Discover

  3. Liferay Portal website - Learn

  4. ➡️ Liferay Portal website - Participate