Liferay Portal 7.0 CE GA4 Release

I am pleased to announce the immediate release of Liferay Portal 7.0 CE GA4! 


Download Now!

Update 6/28/2017

  • Ext Plugins - We thought we had a bug in CE GA4 affecting deployment to Tomcat and upon further investigation we found out that is not the case.  So Ext Plugins are in fact back in GA4.  Documentation for using Ext in Liferay 7 can be found here.  Sorry for all of the confusion.
     
  • Wildfly - The issue affecting Wildfly mentioned below affects more than just staging.  We have issued a patch for the issue below.

What’s New:

  • Ext Environment - Liferay 7 CE GA4 reintroduces the Ext plugin type.  Although there are very few cases where it should be needed thanks to modularity in Liferay 7, there are still a few use cases that exist where the customization can only be handled by an Ext plugin.  Ext plugins have many drawbacks to using them so the rule of thumb is to use them only as a last resort when nothing else will do.   Check out the official documentation for details on developing Ext plugins for Liferay 7..  Ext plugins are deprecated and will not be included in the next major release of Liferay Portal, however we hope to have all use cases handled by OSGi extensions in that release.
     
  • WAB Generator Fixes -  Many fixes have been included around the WAB Generator.  The WAB Generator creates a compatibility layer with Liferay 7 when a more traditional WAR file is needed to create a project.  Spring MVC is one example where a fully compliant OSGi module won’t work due to the fact that Spring MVC still requires xml based descriptors for configuring the application.  For more information see: LPS-71435 and LPS-71194
     
  • Upgrade Duplicate Field Names - Previous versions of Liferay Portal allows you to create structures and templates that let you to use multiple fields with the same name.  If you receive the errors highlighted in the following article then you may need to run the script before running your upgrade to Liferay 7. For more details see: 
  • Many Fixes - Liferay 7 CE GA4 contains over 2000 fixes from CE GA3.  Many of these improvements were added to help ease migrations and upgrades to Liferay 7.  We hope that this version will help your projects be more successful.    For a complete list of enhancements see the complete fix list.

Known Issues

As with any release there a few known issues.  We felt these weren’t show stoppers because they all have documented workarounds or they were only displaying an incorrect message
  • Marketplace requires an update to the plugin to allow signon.  There are two ways to work around this one:
    1. Right-click “Sign-In” and open in a new tab.  Sign into Marketplace normally.  Switch back to the original session and refresh.  The plugin should prompt to auto update.
       
    2. Go to https://web.liferay.com/marketplace/download and download the latest version of the plugin.  Copy the plugin into osgi/marketplace on your installation.  
  • There are some scripting issues when using Wildfly as your application server.   See LPS-54266 for more details.  As a workaround I have created a fragment bundle with the proposed change here.  Place it in the deploy directory and the issue should be resolved.
     
  • Web Form displays incorrect error message for mandatory fields.  See LPS-72573 for more details.
Source Code
The source code for GA4 is provided as a zip on the downloads page and also on our home page on GitHub.   As we indicated on the new community website we are currently looking at ways to improve the contribution process.  Please stay tuned for more details!
 

Compatibility Matrix

Liferay Portal CE is testing extensively against different Open Source App Server/Database server combinations. 
 
Application Servers:
Apache Tomcat 8.0 with Java 8
Wildfly 10.0 with Java 8
Liferay CE Databases:
 
Database Servers:
HSQLDB 2 (only for demonstration, development, and testing)
MySQL 5.6
MariaDB 10
PostgreSQL 9.4
 
Search:
ElasticSearch 2.2.2
 

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 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.
 

Bug Reporting

If you believe you have encountered a bug in the new release you can report your issue on issues.liferay.com, selecting the "7.0.0 CE GA4" release as the value for the "Affects Version/s" field.
 

Upgrading

The upgrade experience for Liferay 7 has been completely revamped  There are some caveats though, so be sure to check out the Upgrading section on the Liferay Developer Network for more details on upgrading to 7.0.
 

Getting Support

Support for Liferay 7.0 CE is provided by our awesome community.  Please visit our new community website for more details on how you can receive support for Liferay Portal 7.0 CE.  
Liferay and its worldwide partner network also provides services, support, training, and consulting around its flagship enterprise offering, Liferay DXP.  
 
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?

As you may have saw we launched a new community site: community.liferay.com this past week.  This is only the beginning and have many other exciting things in the works.  Also work has begun on Liferay 7.1 so stay tuned as we announce more details.
 

Kudos

A special thanks goes out to our Build, Release and Engineering Teams for all of the hard work and effort they put into making this release a reality.  And thanks to everyone in our community! It is thanks to your constant support that makes each release as great as they are! 
 
Blogs
Hi,
A direct question please to answer, what about the clustering functionality that was dropped ? you're making the community version like a useless demo version!

Kind regards,
Djamel
Hi Djamel!
Here: https://community.liferay.com/news/what-is-next-for-the-liferay-community/ Brian said that they are working for reintroducing a cluster feature on CE! Anyway: great work to all the Liferay Team for this release! emoticon
Great work. Reintroduction to EXT type is a welcome news - a feature very much required for CE users. Kudos!
Hello,

despite this comment

Private Messaging: Enables Social Office Private Messaging in Liferay Portal CE 7.0. Although the first three GA releases (GA1, GA2, GA3) of Liferay Portal 7.0 CE contain this app, it will be removed in GA4 and instead released on Liferay Marketplace. To get this app for Liferay DXP, which doesn’t contain it, click here.

taken from https://dev.liferay.com/discover/deployment/-/knowledge_base/7-0/upgrading-social-office#module-installation

Private Messaging Portlet is not available on MarketPlace for Liferay CE GA4. Is available only for DXP version. It is a "forgetfulness" or has been removed for CE?

Sincerely
Hi Claudio, Both Private Messaging and Chat are follow-on releases to CE GA4. They are still undergoing testing and will be released in the next few weeks. Sorry for the confusion.
Thank you for the quick answer!

Since I've duplicated the environment to migrate a Collaboration Platform I'm developing on GA3, and I'm stuck due to the missing dependency, in the meantime I downloaded the most popular (and recent)versions of Private Messaging from Maven Repository in order to continue my tests on GA4.

Thank you again!

Sincerely