Hi Lee!

Thanks for watching my video and giving concrete feedback here. I've also added the Lego documentary to my watch list.

I'm going to summarize what you wrote:

1. Pace of change is too fast  so that a.) it confuses existing users and b.) we do not invest enough in ensuring old features are rock solid
2. Documentation is not up to date
3. Feedback is ignored

Thanks for your feedback Lee. So here's my goal for 2020,  (and for the next decade, but 2020 is the down payment, assuming I get to breathe):

1. Rework  Message Boards The backend is awesome. The frontend is clunky to me. We're NOT getting rid of the existing Message Boards so that we do not confuse existing users. The new frontend is going to be called Questions, it'll be part of the product, and I'm driving it with Javier and Pablo.
   
   Why? Because there's so much noise I don't know how to filter through feedback. So my first step is to fix my phone, get a notepad, so I can hear feedback (which in this case, is adding the new Questions app, and tweaking/inventing the app so I can use it for feedback, and FORCE all of Engineering to answer to the feedback. And if team A ignores your feedback, I will at least now have the ability to filter through it and diagnose it myself, and either side with team A or you. I'll serve as an arbitrator.
   
   I envision having this tool ready by end of Q1. Meanwhile, folks like Jamie will notify of threads like this. 
2. I have confidence documentation will get fixed. We used to have X teams for X products. I've merged the docs team so that it's no one cohesive team that rotates across products. I've also forced them to focus on winsomeness vs. tech talkiness.
   
   We should the skeleton of the new DXP docs, and about 10-20% rewritten by end of 2019. I expect 80% of it rewritten by end of Q1 2020, then they'll swith  to Commerce (2 weeks), DXP Cloud (2 weeks), Analytics Cloud (2 weeks), and then come back and finish off the last 20% of DXP.
3. I now own the Community release for 7.3. I'm having fun with this. My goal?
   
   Hear your feedback, and others like you, and force product management to do something about what you say. We won't listen to everything... I'm glad iPhones don't have keyboards like Blackberrries (but for years I yelled at them for it), but we will process the feedback intelligently and predictably. That's my promise to you Lee.
   
   After we process your feedback, we'll make quick iterations to get it into the product. Hopefully, with this hard work, we'll regain some of our magic, gain relevance, make it obvious what we're good at (yes, we're investing heavily in content management exactly like you said).
   
   Lee, I'm sorry we lost our way. We're finding/clawing our way back, and we need community folks like you. Run with us. I promise to run hard to fix things so long as God gives me breath.

Hey Jordan,
As always, thanks for your feedback.When you say "On new features we are being told to go away and stop complaining" I sincerely hope you don't feel this way. You and I have discussed this year alone tens of suggestions and a good number of them are already implemented or planned to be implemented. It's also true that even when we value a suggestion we need to hear everybody and try to make what we believe is the best call for the product based on all the information. In some cases that will mean that we won't agree with every suggestion.

A good example of this is your suggestion to add back the "Tree view". When you first asked for it, we rejected it based on the feedback we had received at the time complaining about the problems it was causing in certain contexts. We noticed that it was very important for you, since you brought it up quite a few times in several channels after our initial answer. With the information we had at the time our opinion was still that it should not be brought back. However we spent time searching for more feedback. And the result is that you were right and we were wrong. As a result of this, we went back to the drawing board and the tree was re-implemented for 7.3 in a manner that we believe solves the original problem. I actually updated your original Feature Request to notify that it had been implemented a few weeks ago.

Thanks for insisting!

PS: I fully agree that the Alloy Editor integration in these message boards is very painful. I'm not sure if it's a product issue or a liferay.dev issue, but I hope we can fix it.

Hi everyone,

Thank you for bringing the Alloy Editor issues to my attention. I knew there were some issues with it I just didn’t know to what extent. I am working on getting to the bottom of what’s going on and if it’s an issue in liferay.dev or a product level issue. It’s also possible that when we move to using the new Questions app that these issues will be resolved as well. But if this is a product level issue I also want to make sure we address those.

As always Lee, thank you for all that you do!

Hi guys,
I'm still digesting Brian's talk which left me a bit uncomfortable but also somewhat hopeful for the future.
The good news, for me, is that the dev team has heard the wake up call and is moving in the right direction. The "developer experience" is critical to the building of tech capacity in the community.
About some modules being left unchanged for several years or even being deprecated, I think this is quite undesirable but unavoidable if the community is not involved in producing code. My suggestion for this is that Liferay Inc should continue to develop the core product but the community should be invited to maintain satellite projects no longer interesting to the core team. You might say that this  is already possible through marketplace but I think much more could be done by the core team to transfer those project to the community.
Cheers
Fernando

Well, I'd like to chip in a few thoughts.
I also have complained a lot in the last couple of years. About Miller Columns, which I dislike. About the forum message implementation (it was changed to ckeditor in between, but changed back since there were other awful problems) and several other things. Looking through the threads, I often had to agree with the issues Lee brought up and sometimes I had a different opinion.

Navigation: Since the tree comes back, I think this is actually an example, where Liferay listened.

Feature requests: I agree. This has to be handled differently. I put my hope here in the new forum. Putting feature requests in the graveyard err ... Jira was not very gratifying. It became better for me personally, I know a lot of people and asked Jorge or somebody else in Slack or at Devcon to look at something, but that's just me.  All feature requests should be evaluated and answered. There are so many brilliant people working with Liferay and they should be listened to. And their requirements and needs might vastly differ from mine.

"Forum 2.0": I see several important features that are needed for a better forum. The AlloyEditor is annoying, but it is actually a detail. Currently the forum has too many categories/threads, it is hard to find things and often hard to get an answer. Without the "Recent Posts" feature, the forum would be more or less useless.

Here's what I think: Get rid of the categories/threads. Maybe add some high level buttons/categories like "Quick start" like: "Create Feature Request", "Ask a question", "Announcement", ...

But in general, encourage people to categorize/tag their messages, if they want help. The better they Categorize, the better the result. Maybe setting at least one category should be mandatory. This is a lot of work for the moderators, some people will do it wrong, some will try to abuse it (e.g. by adding all categories) and sometimes the categories even need to be changed. But I believe the result will be better.

Pace of change: Oh, this is a hard one. In general, I like evolution more than revolution. Small changes here and there. But this also requires continuous delivery and feedback. Change was good? Keep. Change was bad? Rollback/Do different.

But: Liferay needs/needed to change fast and better yesterday than today. I have worked with at least 8 different companies on Liferay projects this year. And I hear a lot of complaints. The CMS is clunky. Staging is horrible. Why do I have to ... They can live with the product, but we actually lost a customer early this year, he has moved on to another product, which is modern and userfriendly and nicer.

The sad thing is, had I had Fragments last year, it might have made a difference. I showed Fragments and the new drag & drop features to several customers in the last few weeks and I believe, we won at least one new customer only because I could show the new Fragments. The old customers are now asking, when they can upgrade. Some are currently working on getting the budget.

I believe, this revolution was long overdue. Btw. OSGI was also a revolution, albeit one that was hard to sell. There are some other places where I was asking for a revolution, e.g. the theme. I know, there are actually some plans here to do better. And I think, Staging should be shot and killed.
Change is painful, I know. But things can't stay the same.

Feedback: I always had the feeling that Liferay doesn't ask the community enough. Or maybe it's customers. Maybe I am wrong here, but do you actually ask people what they need? Maybe you do and I am totally wrong here, but the number of questionnaires I have filled out in the last 9 years is pretty, pretty small (There was one a couple of years ago where you asked about reorganizing the system settings, maybe one or two more, but that's all I can recall).

Documentation: Another hard one. When I started with Liferay, it was bad. And I mean: Really bad. It is a lot better nowadays. If you actually look into the documentation, you find a lot of information. But, there is the version problem. You find documentation for 7.0. Is it still correct? Do I need to do something differently for 7.2? The 7.2 page doesn't exist (yet?).

There will always be missing parts. But I need the stuff that's there to be correct and I need to know for which versions it is correct.
Also: Maybe you should do more videos. Or hire Andrew perhaps :-)

Still digesting most of these replies, but firstly it's brilliant Brian is leading in this way. Thank you so much Brian!


6.1 for me was junk, I questioned what I had taken on in accepting the job. 6.2 looked like it solved a lot of issues with 6.1. And when we looked at 7.0 the choice was clear to move on to 7, particularly for me as a front end ... DXP really has been the right thing to adopt. DXP really changed my opinion on Liferay. I was all on Wordpress before, I actually came on-board at my current company when arriving in the states working on WP sites. I was warned in my interview for the position working with Liferay as a vendor that this thing was not easy.


The S word ... Sharepoint
There is something though that makes all of this irrelevant for enterprise. Sharepoint. It has always been there, even in previous positions I've had and has powerful advocates. I suffered through an adoption of Red Dot / Open Text. Horrible. Horrid.


Open Text
What Open Text did well though that Liferay also does is the re-publication of one item of content in multiple places. Wordpress can't easily do that, it wasn't meant to. So for me at least even with fragments, don't get rid of web content because web content is the base source of content and fragments can co-exist with web content.

Can I recommend Liferay as a tool to manage thousands of websites? Not yet.


Wordpress = Community
So what's so good about Wordpress? Resources and community. It was the CMS I learned and still shapes my ideal vision of what good content management is. The documentation is there and there are tonnes of developers churning out free and non-free extensions. It has a market and is marketable. Wordpress can be made secure, but in enterprise one thing Liferay has over Wordpress is security. Within my circle of friends at the time I had several Wordpress experts for me to help and for them to help me.


Liferay Features
In that Lego documentary they say how "the system" is everything. Their troubles were partly down to a move away from "the system".

Blogging. Here's a real fear of mine for blogs, one of the better things about Liferay. Web Content isn't blogging. You've got a system to make blogs look good they are called Application Display Templates. So why move away from that?? Build templates for us, build a template gallery. Have a template market place. Believe in widget templates and stop changing the name of what they are. We don't need to create content pages to have nice blogs, just because fragments are now the in-trend thing. Let's not forget what we do have in search of things we could have.

There is no such thing as too many templates.

I've seen the social features of Liferay trimmed back. Why? Now I've lost the ability to "friend" my co-workers. The invite portlet stopped working. There's no obvious "join this site" button out of the box. The dockbar doesn't tell me if I'm even a member of the site. Make mentioning work, make microblogs work, make the activity portlet the center of the universe on a users my dashboard ... out of the box, without the need to set it up. Why remove bookmarks? Bookmarks seems like an obvious thing to have on a users dashboard right? Gamification, could have been brilliant but was left to collect dust.


There's no trending portlet, we had to build one. Very painfully. Search sucks, it still sucks, it's going to suck until it's given the focus it needs. RSS is still relevant and the push for headless is basically RSS evolved. It still makes no sense to remove RSS.


Deprecating features is simply the notion that you didn't try hard enough to make it work, so it didn't work and now it's gone and we've moved on to the next trend.


Tags by the way, we need enforcement of tagging of content. Content sets and asset publisher are going to live and die on this. The URL's suck. This has got to change, sharing Liferay content on other platforms is painful. Say you're sharing a message board post via a chat client. That URL is garbage.


Alloy Editor, something needs to happen. I don't know what that is other than giving it to one group of non-developers and making them use it and spill out a huge stream of consciousness to one sole engineer about their experience with it, give Alloy Editor to one person or at least fund a team that only focus on the editor. It's the worst UX I've ever had with an online editor.

The biggest thing though is that none of these complaints are particularly new or recent. Focusing on what the user's experience of Liferay is seems to be the best place to start healing.

Liferay "for" users instead of "vs" users ...


Why not do a dating approach to this and match users with developers. Hey so I code the WEM, you love/hate the WEM ... Let's WEM together.

​​​​​​​
"Pace of change: Oh, this is a hard one. In general, I like evolution more than revolution. Small changes here and there. But this also requires continuous delivery and feedback."


The problem I see with releases is that they are not incremental. They are mini revolutions. We're on DXP 10.1 at this point to call it DXP 7 is very odd. Would a community sandbox work better than releases? Liferay then run a beta programme where they cloud host the bundle and we are given a challenge to build a community site, a communication site or a special interest site?

Then new features are added into (or taken away from) that sandbox, for our feedback. Then we're building one source of experience to reference to chat about.

I don't have hope for the future when I see functionality that is broken and labeled won't fix. So if Liferay won't fix bugs they've found in the core fundamental content management system what hope do we have of a) getting our issues fixed b) getting features that would be useful to us taken seriously?

https://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-106170

Like killing web content and not having it working in fragments will be the death of the portal. It'll be ok for new customers who never used web content, but it's a big F-U to existing customers with thousands of web content articles. Maybe that's the direction Liferay is going, to stick a middle finger up to existing users?

That's not the impression Brian gives, but you can't help get the impression that in whatever is going on users needs are being ignored.

Alloy Editor ... start again. Take for example ...
https://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-99406

You can't add images and resize them all to be exactly the same width. Try. It's not possible. And it's not like users are being silent on these issues. Alloy Editor sucks and we're telling you every month it sucks and guess what? With each new version it sucks more.

Hey Lee,Why do you think that we are "killing web content and not having it working in fragments will be the death of the portal"?In fact the opposite is true, (structured) web content is still a key feature and we are investing a lot in it, including improvements to the editor and providing more options to control how they are displayed (i.e. through fragments). For example, since 7.2, a non-technical user can create new structures, create content and define how to display them in a page without having to write any code (in the past a freemarker template was necessary).We believe that that both Web Content (might be renamed to Structured Content for clarity) and Inline Content are important and complementary. The former is most useful for content-centric scenarios (where content is created first and presentation is defined later on) while the latter is more convenient for page-centric scenarios (where the content and their page are seen as one, at least to begin with). We want Liferay to be a great system for both scenarios, providing a bridge between them so that you can start with one and switch to the other or stay anywhere in between if it makes sense for your needs.