Blogs

We had a long conversation at the office regarding release process, versioning, etc, that we'll be presenting at the LA retreat this year. But in a nutshell the goals were to:- increase timeliness- improve the quality- lock down features- have a LTS / EOL plan for incremental micro (x.y.z)/ minor (x.y)releases- formalize a QA process- start a beta testing program5.0 will be almost...

Okay, I couldn't resist posting this. We had our first snow in this area today (Southern New Jersey, not far from Philadelphia, PA), and it was the triple whammy of: Christmas coming Snow Getting ready to attend the Liferay retreat that caused my two and a half year-old daughter to begin combining the three concepts in song. Though I didn't get it on video, she...

In the last few weeks I have spent quite some time trying to debug some weird problems on deployments of Liferay.  Here are a few tricks that I have come across that have proven to be pretty useful. 1. Monitoring Memory and CPU usage This is pretty basic and is quite helpful in performance tests.  Monitoring these aspects will help determine if a system is memory-bound or...

Good news all you Linux Liferay users/developers! With the most recent release of Adobe Flash Player (Version: 9,0,115,0), the new multi-file uploader available in the portal now works in Linux. I'm using Ubuntu 7.10, and though there isn't a .deb yet, I just couldn't wait anymore. I downloaded the .tar.gz package, followed the instructions and voilà, it worked! Note: I just...

4.3.5 is the latest stable and recommended production release from Liferay. Release Notes: http://support.liferay.com/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10014&styleName=Html&version=10260 SVN Tag: http://lportal.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lportal/portal/tags/4.3.5/ This release includes more bug fixes. Most notable is that this fixes the problem with compiling large...

Before I joined Liferay I used to check up on Brian's work from time to time, hoping I could somehow be a part of this small piece of software called Liferay EP. As we're approaching our 9th year in development and our second annual Liferay retreat, I became a little reflective of the early days. Here's a sneak peak of Liferay EP 1.7.5 (October 10, 2002). Note that back then you had to...

This weekend is the annual Liferay retreat. That means that many of us are preparing to head to LA to meet and greet co-workers we don't often see in person. For my familly and I, it is especially nice to get away and see new places... we don't get away much. Well, mother nature was kind enough to realize that we would be away for a week and thoughtfully took it upon herself to...

Recently I happened across a thread where Carlos Santos Sáenz was asking about how to best set up Roles and permissions.  As I attempted to duplicate Carlos' efforts, I realized that the root cause of his (and probably so many other people's ) difficulties had to do with Liferay's UI.  I have to admit that it is confusing at times for me too, which is what motivated me to...

What is the hardest part about programming? I've heard many suggestions by peers, bosses, employees, students and professors. I've heard algorithms, front end (html/javascript), backend (database connections, classes), code analysis, and reading/decifering other peoples code just to name a few. While I would agree that all these things can have their hard parts, I don't believe...

Since there are now six Liferay developers living in Columbus, Ohio Monday through Thursday I was thinking that we could start showing up the JUGs if anybody is interested. I have done quite a bit of training on Liferay, and we would have a few guys there that really know the Liferay architecture well. If anybody would be interested in having us show up one night and speak on Liferay,...

When I first started at Liferay I started using Eclipse. After about six months I found the Web Toolkit for Eclipse. I used that for about a year and a half total, until I got staffed consulting for the current company I'm consulting for. Once I got here I saw that all the in house developers were using IntelliJ Idea. As we are an open source software company, we qualify for free...

I've been meaning all month to get my driver's license renewed. Here in New Jersey, this is the kind of thing many people have been trained to dread. Long wait times and surly people behind the counter were the norm for so long that I think the situation even became known across the country. I wanted to get this done early in the month so that I wouldn't get stuck with all the...

Need to access session attributes from Velocity?   Well, from a Velocity theme (*.vm), you can simply do something like:   $request.getAttribute("USER_ID")   or...   $request.getSession().getAttribute("LIFERAY_SHARED_VISITED_GROUP_ID_RECENT")     However, what about from a Velocity template in a Journal Content Portlet?...

In Hamburg trying to wrap up a project, and we've been working quite a lot. It's easy to forget how beautiful Hamburg is:          

I love Johnny Rockets Here is a pic of the Ohio crew in the new Johnny Rockets in CMH

Pentaho has created a set of sample portlets for integration with a JSR-168 compliant portlet container.  Though not designed explicitly for Liferay, I have started a Wiki for the installation of these portlets on Liferay.

It's been a while since my last post, but here I'm at it again. This will be the first of a series of posts where I plan to write about the latest improvements to Liferay as we develope them. I will not only talk about those that I develop myself but also about those done by others if I see that they do not do it themselves. The end purpose is to keep everyone interested more aware of...

Inside public men toilets at Dalian city of Mainland China, you may read this sign when you stand in front of urinal.   向前一小步, 文明一大步 One small step forward, one giant leap for civilization   Everytime I look at this sign, it reminds me the first astronaut stepped on the moon, Neil Armstrong. He said "That's one small step for man, One giant leap for...

What's this? Two blog posts within five minutes? Yes, well, I thought this would be appropriate as we are about to celebrate Thanksgiving here in the United States. I've had this hanging on my wall for years. I originally got it from a humor mailing list years ago (2000, I think). --- TO BE THANKFUL FOR:The mess to clean after a party because I have been surrounded by friends.The...