Liferay 7 Alpha 2 - Getting closer to beta

 

We continue our path towards releasing Liferay 7 with a new alpha release that focuses on fixing bugs and small improvements. This release fixes 254 bugs since Alpha 1 and adds +100 small improvements.

During this time we have also had the opportunity to present Liferay 7 twice: first in Germany during DevCon and later in Spain during the Spain Symposium. We are super grateful with the very positive feedback of this new version, its features and the significant architectural improvements to make Liferay (and your developments) much more modular. If you didn’t have a chance to attend any of these two events, don’t worry because you will have more opportunities. Coming next we have events in London (later this week), Florence, Italy (next week), Chicago (can’t miss this one if you live in the US!), Viena, Austria and Sao Paulo, Brazil (another great opportunity to meet many Liferay developers).

During these events and through the Community Expedition (you are already enrolled, right?) we are receiving tons of feedback and we are working hard to satisfy as much of it as we can. Here are some key aspects that we are focusing on, highlighting what you can already see in this Alpha release:

  1. Product Menu: We’ve received a lot of good feedback on the new product menu but we have also realized that it can be a bit confusing, especially at first. We have been playing around with several variations and testing them internally. In Alpha 2 you can see some small improvements based on the conclusions from these tests, such as moving the control bar to the top.
    More improvements will come in upcoming releases.

  2. More application redesigns based on Lexicon: We keep working on new designs for the out of the box applications. In this release Dynamic Data Lists, Structures, Templates and the new Image Selector debut a new Lexicon based design.



    We are currently working on the rest of the portlets in site administration as well as the user administration portlets.

  3. Data upgrades: Alpha 2 includes a new upgrade framework that we have created to provide more control over the upgrade process and increase reliability. Most of our portlets have already been updated to use the new framework so if you consider yourself brave enough you can go ahead and try to upgrade your existing site(s). If you do, please give us your feedback. One of the great benefits of this new framework is that it will be possible to execute the upgrade for each module independently, check the status, re-run it as many times as desired, etc. This will be especially useful in portals with tons of data.

 

Ready to download it? Get Liferay 7 Alpha 2 now from sourceforge, and let us know what you think.

 
Blogs
Will definitely try it out; thank you! I checked out master a couple weeks back; and found many fixes since alpha 1; I'm amazed how fast (knock on wood) they're fixed! Outstanding job; looking forward to it.
I think I'm missing something obvious in all the UI changes: once you add a page, for instance, how do you navigate back to the site in order to see that page? In previous versions there was always that "back to the site" link in the upper left of the main panel. I don't see anything equivalent here. Also, putting the 'add' icon in the lower right is very Google-ish, but it's not expected if all the other controls are on top or on the left. All in all though, looking good.

One more bit: so Lexicon is some combination of styles and javascript? Is this still based on AlloyUI + Bootstrap or did another change happen? I thought AlloyUI was to be phased out because YUI3 was getting mothballed.
Hey Joseph,

Thanks for your feedback!

Regarding adding a page, what you see in alpha 2 is (clearly) unfinished. The final solution, which we are trying hard to include in our next alpha/beta release includes the page hierarchy in the product menu and allows adding a page from there. I'd love to hear your feedback once we have it ready.

Regarding the 'add' icon in the lower right corner we have done and keep doing testing to ensure it works from a user experience perspective. In general when it's shown there are no more primary actions in that view, but right now some portlets' redesign might be unfinished which is why it might be confusing. We are making progress quite fast in this front though so hopefully in the next few releases it will make more sense. Please let me know if you still think it doesn't.

Regarding Lexicon, it is a design language. Liferay 7 includes an implementation (whose internal name is Atlas) for the web and based on Bootstrap. It does not depend on AlloyUI or YUI3. These two libraries are still being used in specific cases within some portlets when there was no proper replacement yet, but eventually we will change them all and will stop shipping them out of the box.
Jorge, thank you for your prompt response. I was using the example of adding a page but the same issue extends to anything you would need to do on a control panel page and then go back to the site. Of course I understand it's unfinished, but it seemed to me that this must be so annoying to the developers as they work on getting 7.0 ready that they would have fixed that first, and I must be missing the obvious.
I could see the 'add' icon in the lower right being expected if you're approaching this from a mobile first perspective. In that situation the relative size of the icon would make it much more prominent.
Thanks again. It really looks like you folks are giving Liferay a thorough shake out of some of the more cruftier elements, and I can't wait to see the final product.
any forecast on when the first beta version will be released?

Regards
It was already released: https://www.liferay.com/es/web/jorge.ferrer/blog/-/blogs/liferay-7-beta-1-what-a-christmas-present-

In fact we even have a Beta 2 and might have a Beta 3 this week emoticon