Liferay 7 Beta 1 - What a Christmas present!

Just in time to throw a big celebration we finally have achieved Beta status for Liferay 7!

As mentioned in a previous blog entry, the criteria to meet Beta status is:

  1. Data upgrade finalized for all bundled applications: You can now start testing the upgrades from your Liferay installations to Liferay 7. We really need your help here since there are so many different variations to consider. With your help it will be much faster to make upgrades rock solid. Please try it out and notify any issues through our Community Expedition forums.

  2. Bundled plugins/modules included: our final bundles come with many plugins/modules included out of the box. For beta, we are already including those that we plan to release in the final bundle. This is also an opportunity for you to check them out and let us know if you think anyone should be added or removed (since Liferay 7 is so modular, adding or removing is much more granular than before).

  3. Bundle with Tomcat and JBoss EAP supported: This is a slight variation from our criteria. We have switched from Wildfly to JBoss EAP, although Wildfly will still be supported in our final release.

  4. Official languages translated to at least 70% of all keys: Mission accomplished!

  5. Releasability index: at least 75%. This is a metric that we came up with using a formula that takes into account all the known and verified bugs reported in JIRA (remember that your bug reports for alphas and betas help a lot) as well as pass rates for our functional automated tests.This release is over 76%.

Improvements

This release also has tons of bugs solved and quite a few improvements. These improvements included applying more lexicon based designs, finishing some features and doing several UX improvements based on our own tests and the feedback from our explorers.

One significant UX change that I would like to highlight is the design changes in the Product Menu. As you can see in the picture below we have decided to switch from a tabs for the top level to an accordeon:

 

The main reasons for this change are:

  1. It works much better for users with fewer permissions (which are the majority) and it scales better for those with more permissions.
  2. It avoids navigation within the menu, which proved to be confusing to many users (who kept asking "What's this back arrow here?"
  3. It provides more space to show the user name, which allowed removing the area at the bottom with the (duplicated) user name.
  4. Attempts to solve the situation where users were asking "How do I go back?" after going to a personal or control panel application. We identified that in those cases the users wanted to go back to the site they were at, so now that site is always visible in the menu and there is a link to go to the site if desired. 

This menu also has an integrated pages tree, which allows for faster navigation through the site hierarchy for administrators:

Note: We are still trying out different ways to add pages. The one in this release has proved to have some issues, so it will still change before the final release.

Go ahead and try it out!

If you haven't downloaded any of the alphas yet, this release is for you. And if you have, we welcome your collaboration more than ever. Go ahead and get Liferay 7 Beta 1 now from Sourceforge, and give us your feedback.