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Liferay Portal 6.2 Release Notes

The Liferay Portal 6.2 release is a major release, containing many additional features over the previous release. Liferay recommends that all users upgrade to this release so they can take advantage of these features. This release addresses several usability issues, provides enhancements to existing functionality, and gives developers an easier way to work with mobile clients. What follows is a summarized list of the important enhancement highlights. For a full list, please see the release notes document in our issue tracker.

Mobile Devices

When building pages, Liferay Portal 6.2 provides an always-available preview.

Mobile devices are first-class citizens in Liferay Portal 6.2. Site administrators have easy access on every page to preview what their pages look like on different screen sizes. Layouts are responsive, and out of the box applications convert app menus to drop down menus on small screens.

On the desktop, menus take advantage of available screen real estate.

Mobile Device Rules now make it much easier to set up Mobile Device Families to detect classifications of devices to present the most optimized view for that device type. It's much easier to set up classification rules for mobile device families in Liferay Portal 6.2.

On mobile devices, menus collapse to make way for content.

User Experience

The default theme has been completely redesigned with usability in mind. In addition to the enhancements mentioned above for mobile devices, the underlying framework is now based on Bootstrap. For front-end developers, this makes Liferay Portal much easier to theme. Developers can take advantage of a large library of existing Bootstrap-based themes and apply them to Liferay Portal.

User interface items have been cleaned up and standardized. Site administration has been divided into four semantic sections. A site switcher is available in a standard place on the UI, so you never have to go looking for it. Pages can be edited in context. The list of UI enhancements is so big that we'd bore you to death if we listed it all, so we highly recommend you check it out for yourself.

Some of the many UI improvements are available while administering sites.

Liferay Portal's administration interface has undergone a complete re-think and overhaul. Listening to user feedback, we realized that many users were unnecessarily disabling the Dockbar, so we made it more unobtrusive, and we separated portal administration functions from site administration functions. Edit controls for sites now run down the side of a page, and items in the Dockbar only appear if a user has access to them. This reduces the size of the Dockbar and makes it show only information that's pertinent to the current user.

As you can see, the user's personal account is kept separate from the Control Panel, and sites can be administered without access to the Control Panel. Users' personal sites' public and private pages have been renamed to My Profile and My Dashboard, respectively, and they appear under the user's name. This sets a user's personal area off from the rest of the sites he or she has access to.

The new Dockbar is small and shows only necessary information for the current user.

Recycle Bin

The Recycle Bin can support any Liferay asset.

Liferay Portal 6.2 now has a Recycle Bin where deleted content goes. All the relevant out of the box applications have been enhanced to use the Recycle Bin, and there is a new API that allows developers to enable the Recycle Bin in their applications.

By default, items in the Recycle Bin are permanently deleted after 30 days, but this is fully configurable on a per-site basis through the site settings.

Application Display Templates

Users frequently wanted to customize the way a built-in application looked, and Liferay Portal has always offered that through hook or ext plugins. Now it's even easier to do that with Application Display Templates. These are simple FreeMarker templates that site administrators can enter right from the site administration screen. Nothing needs to be deployed, and the templates can be applied immediately.

Once a template is written, it is applied through a particular application's Configuration menu.

Application Display Templates let you customize built-in applications quickly.

Localization Improvements

Friendly URLs are now location-aware, and can be defined on a per-language basis. In addition to this, a default language can be set for each site.

Page Management

The side panel lets you create your site without ever leaving it.

In the past, creating and managing pages and their content was done from different screens. Liferay Portal 6.2 pulls all that functionality together into a single panel on the left side of the screen. This is an incredible convenience for site administrators as they build their pages.

The panel's Content pane has a search facility that makes finding content to add to your site fairly effortless. You can create content to add to your page right from the side panel. It's also easy to find existing content to add to your pages: it's all conveniently listed for you, complete with previews. Once you've found your content, a single click places it on the page.

Staging

Staging received a major enhancement in Liferay Portal 6.1, and in version 6.2, it continues to be refined. During updates from staging to production, sometimes inconsistencies can occur, particularly if someone has already changed content in production without staging it first. Liferay Portal 6.2 now validates staging updates and warns of potential inconsistencies. To further prevent this problem, you can now disable live changes when remote staging is enabled.

Instead of a user name and password combination, you can now set up a pre-shared key between your staging server and your production server, which is more secure.

Staging has received important enhancements in Liferay Portal 6.2.

Site Membership Management

Liferay 6.2 introduces a new framework for automatic site memberships. This lets you disable manual site membership management and, out of the box, restrict memberships only to those who are members of a parent site. Developers can use this framework to create any kind of site membership rules they want.

Site Hierarchies

Sites can be organized the way they make sense in the real world.

Many Liferay Portal users wanted a way to group related sites together. With version 6.2, you now can: site hierarchies enable you to create related groups of sites and organize them the way you want.

You can organize sites to unlimited levels of depth, and the Site Membership Management framework mentioned above makes it easy for you to make sure only the proper users have access to the relevant parts of the hierarchy.

Site hierarchies give you more than just a way to organize sites. Sites that are part of a hierarchy can share content inside the hierarchy. This prevents you from unnecessarily having to copy content from one site to another, just to publish the same thing on two sites. Sites in hierarchies can also take advantage of navigation up and down the hierarchy, making it easier for users to find relevant content on all sites in the hierarchy.

Sites can be set up to share content.

Web Content Management

Organize your content in folders with Liferay Portal 6.2.

It's much easier to organize web content than it ever was before. Liferay Portal 6.2 introduces web content folders. You can now create folders and sub-folders for web content the same way you can create them for Documents and Media.

As you can see, the web content interface has been redesigned, inspired by the Documents and Media interface. But there's more than just a new, pretty face.

Liferay Portal 6.2 includes a new template editor, complete with syntax highlighting, a palette with available variables that can be used in templates, and autocomplete.

This template editor is available not only in web content, but also in Application Display Templates and Dynamic Data lists.

The template editor is a development environment for web content templates.

Asset Publisher

The Asset Publisher has received numerous improvements. Its performance has been improved significantly, as now it uses the search index (rather than database queries) to return entries. Users can subscribe to any list of content, and its UI has been simplified.

Document Management

Drag and drop works on all operating systems, even Linux.

Documents and Media received some small refinements in Liferay Portal 6.2. Drag and Drop from your operating system to your browser is now supported.

In addition to this, users can now subscribe to be notified of changes to folders or documents stored in the Docs and Media library.

New Calendar Application

The Calendar application has been completely redesigned and replaced in Liferay Portal 6.2. It is now a plugin, which means you can undeploy it if you aren't using the calendar. It now has a much more modern UI, can display multiple, sharable calendars, and supports resource reservations.

In addition to this, calendars can be shared via RSS feeds, so you can make a calendar available to users outside of Liferay Portal.

The new calendar's improved UI lets you drag events around to change them.

Platform Improvements

In addition to these visible improvements, Liferay Portal 6.2 has received numerous improvements under the hood. The first version of our OSGi container is available in Liferay Portal 6.2. Users can deploy OSGi bundles into Liferay and can develop plugins as OSGi bundles.

OSGi bundles coexist with regular Liferay plugins seamlessly.

Liferay Portal 6.2 also serves as an OAuth server. This lets you use your Liferay Portal installation as an authentication service. Your users can sign in to multiple websites with their credentials from your site.

For larger deployments, Liferay Portal 6.2 introduces portlet sandboxing. This lets you decide to run certain applications in their own JVMs. You can use this feature to make your portal more resilient: if you have some unstable applications, place them in their own JVMs, and if they crash, they can't bring down your portal.

Liferay Portal 6.2 also includes integration hooks for real-time analytics software. This lets you easily profile your server while it's running in order to debug issues you may be having with a custom application.

Liferay Portal 6.2 is a major release that incorporates many enhancements. These enhancements make upgrading your site to the latest release a worthwhile endeavor, and we highly recommend that you upgrade your site to this latest release.

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