Changes to Community Blogs

Over the weekend you may have have noticed our community blogs page got a makeover! There are several new additions and changes to the page which we hope will make your liferay.com blogging experience better and more informative, and make it easier for you to not only keep up with what's going on but to contribute your ideas in a more structured/categorized way.

Highlighted Bloggers

First, I wanted to thank all of you who have contributed to your blogs on liferay.com!

Since opening up liferay.com blogging to our entire community in 2013, we have been thrilled to see how our community has responded, with lots of informative entries and quality content.. but the very coarse categorization (Staff vs. Community) isn't enough, can be confusing for staff, and the sheer number of posts showing up in each of these buckets means that you get a big flat list of tons of blog entries, some really good, and some that could have used more polishing before publishing 

To help you with choosing what to read, the new main blog landing page is now a curated list, showing you the "best of the best" (as decided by our editorial staff and feedback from the community on specific posts). As a reader, it should be the first thing you follow/subscribe to! The same list of highlighted blogs will also appear on the right side of the community landing page.

You can still follow all of our community's blog posts by clicking on the All tab, which will work as before and show a reverse chronological list of all blog posts. We hope that you find value in the curation and are motivated to produce high quality posts that show up here!

How do I get highlighted?

It's really easy (well, easy to understand, a bit harder to execute) - just publish quality content that is easy to read, informative, and does a good job at reaching your intended audience. You might want to read through the Blog Guidelines at the bottom of the Content Policy page for some tips about writing quality posts. If you do it enough, your readers will respond, and our curation department will most definitely recognize you and highlight you or your blog posts, or both!

Non-highlighted posts will continue to show up on the All category (and of course, your personal blog page!).

Categories

Not everyone is interested in technical blogs, or blogs about Liferay the company, so we've enabled Categories (using Liferay's built-in categories feature of course!). Categories allow blog authors to mark their posts to be in a particular category, causing it to show up on the specific sub-page of the All tab. You can also subscribe/follow individual categories using the RSS links at the bottom of each tab. We started small: Company posts relate to Liferay the company (such as Zeno's recent post about his Liferay Brazil office experiences), whereas Technical posts are (you guessed it) more technical in nature, like Srikanth's recent post about Service Builder. The General category is for posts that don't fit in the other categories.

As an author, you will be required to specify a category (with the default being General). Be sure to choose wisely! Only staff members will be able to pick the Company category. This will help your readers pick the posts they are most interested in. If you have suggestions for more categories, let us know in comments (yeah, there are tons of possibilities here, but the simpler the better, for UI and UX!).

Also note that your past posts aren't automatically categorized - if you want them to appear in the proper category, you will need to Edit them and select the right category on the Edit screen.

Most Active Bloggers

There is also a new link on the left navigation area under Blogs - Most Active Bloggers will show you the most active bloggers by number of posts in the past 6 months, regardless of whether they have produced any highlighted blogs. Readers who want to keep up to date in the community can find out exactly who is contributing on liferay.com blogs using this page. The page also features easy RSS feed links for each individual author.

Note that this list only shows bloggers from liferay.com - if you had your external blog listed previously, it will be returning very soon, so stay tuned!

Updated Look & Feel

The blogs pages also has a new look, with rounded pictures, crisper fonts, more category and subject lozenges, and new icons for views and comments. We hope you like the look of the new page, along with the new features and new curated lists.

How do I post a blog?

Everyone who has an account on liferay.com can publish blog posts. To publish a blog, visit your profile page by logging in, clicking your profile picture at the upper right, and choose Account and then click Profile at the top next to your profile picture (or, if you know your screen name, just type in liferay.com/web/{screenname}/profile into your browser's address bar).

Once on your profile page, look for the Blog link on the left, and click on it, and click the Add Entry button to draft a new entry using Liferay's built-in WYSIWYG editor. If you do not see a Blog link, you will need to request a blog (this is an additional anti-spam measure, as long as your account is in good standing you will get a blog!). Happy blogging!

Kudos

As usual, I am only the messenger here, and several people chipped in to make this a reality. Ryan Schuhler, Nathan Cook, Enoch Chu, Luke Shackelford, and Amos Fong worked on the frontend and backend development, while Juan Hidalgo and Yoshiki Hisamoto were responsible for the awesome design. And you, our community, were and continue to be instrumental in making our blogs interesting and informative!

[Martin Yan]

This was much needed...Good stuff!

[Olaf Kock]

Oh no - It looks like this broke the old RSS feeds. Can you bring them back?

[James Falkner]

Yep, oversight on our part. We will try to get them back (and make them stable for the future). Thanks for the report

[Olaf Kock]

Thanks. I think this is a good opportunity to promote this feature request: https://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-48960 (please vote for this issue to get stable RSS URLs)