Liferay 7 Milestone 6 - Getting ready for the launching pad

Together with the summer season and the sunny days the sixth milestone has come too. We are getting closer to the end of the year, and this will be one of the last milestones so all development teams are working on finishing some of the features and improvements that have been months in the works to get everything ready for the alpha/beta cycles. This milestone comes very shortly after 5 but we wanted to make sure you had an opportunity to provide feedback through the Community Expedition program on a few but really cool features. I hope you like them.

This milestone includes +130 stories finished since M5 was released the last month. This entry will explores some of the most relevants features and improvements.

Forms, Structures & Templates

A greatly demanded feature that has been several months in the oven is support for versioning of both structures and templates. It will work similarly as versions of articles. You can start the work on a draft version, approve it later or revert to a specific version.

A second large improvement we are working on in this area is a new form building experience, easier to use and more powerful. And you can already taste some of that already in this milestone.

First, you can now create multi-page forms and organize the fields in advanced form layouts by creating rows and columns.

Second, publishing any form in a site is now also easier with the new 'Form' portlet:

And you probably guessed this already, but we’ve also embraced modularity here: the form rendering, form validation and field types are OSGi modules, so you can extend it to adapt it to your own needs. Whatever they are.

WCM

One frequently used capability that Liferay provides when building a site was to be able to embed a portlet from a theme, so that it’s visible in all pages. This is often done for breadcrumbs, language, navigation. We’ve now added the ability to configure these portlets just like any other through the UI, instead of having to hardcode the configuration in the themes. We are actually leveraging this ourselves in the default theme where the breadcrumb is being embedded:

 

When the configuration is changed, it will be shared in all pages of the site where the portlet is shown.

New Search Infrastructure

This is yet another really big improvement that it’s been several months in the kitchen: starting with Liferay 7, ElasticSearch will be replacing Lucene as the default search engine!

And this is not just a one by one replacement, it comes filled with many many improvements, both functional (to increase search accuracy) and non-functional (to improve performance and facilitate clustering of indexes).

If you are interested in looking at the technical details check LPS-56180.

More

There are also many more technical improvements, including an upgrade to Tomcat 7.0.62, upgrading to reCAPTCHA 2, extracting more and more features as modules, adding new Component based extension points, better configurability through the new settings API and much more.

If you browse around you will probably start seeing many more improvements, but most are still considered half-baked yet, so we preferred to not highlight them. In any case, feel free to provide feedback on them if you think it can help make the product better.

That's it, f you haven’t done it yet go ahead and download Milestone 6 now from sourceforge. And remember that this year your feedback is more useful than ever since you can talk directly with the developers of each feature by joining the Liferay 7 Community Expedition. Go ahead and participate to make sure Liferay 7 fits your needs in the best way possible.


Esther Sanz & Jorge Ferrer

Blogs
I unzipped the file and started up via tomcat-7.0.62/bin/startup.sh. It failed on an NPE.
Hey Joseph,

Thanks for trying out Milestone 6. Is that the first error you see in the logs? Have you checked for any previous error that could point to something wrong in the environment?

My advice would be to join the Community Expedition (if you haven't yet) and use its forums to post your logs and get help there.

This is a milestone release, so there are more issues than with a regular release, so we really appreciate if you can share them with us so that they can be fixed ASAP.
Will Liferay 7 support Java 8?

It should definitely I think, because Java 7 is not supported by Oracle anymore...
@Andrius yes we plan on supporting Java 8. If you're on Liferay 6.2 , you'll notice that we've already updated it to support Java 8. Liferay 7 current has a couple of issues with Java 8 that we've yet to address but we will before release.
That's a good news!

Indeed when looking at the https://www.liferay.com/services/support/compatibility-matrix I see that Oracle JDK 8 is in the list of supported platforms for 6.2 EE. Sadly, Tomcat 7 is not in the same part of the support matrix. I suppose this means that Tomcat 7 / JDK 8 is not a supported combination . Are there plans to support this combination?