Community Roundup

Wow, has it really been one month since my last roundup?  Apologies!  As usual, there are many moving parts to the World of Liferay and I spend a lot of time trying to keep up with it all, and sometimes things drop off the radar.  But they always come back, thanks to my handy organizer (aka TextWrangler).  We've been very busy here in the Liferay Community, and it will be getting more action-packed as the year progresses.  So grab your coffee and start clickin':

• Did you notice the website upgrade that took place earlier this month?  Liferay.com is now running on Liferay Portal 6 EE!  This brings a whole new set of possibilities to all facets of the website, through the new features in the portal.  The content didn't change much, but pages now have consistent L&F and navigation.  It's also now a mobile-enabled site.  You can even resize your desktop browser to be thinner and watch the layout change dynamically.  Watch for these and other features to be exposed in the coming months, and enjoy the upgraded performance!  Interestingly enough, Vaadin also completed their site upgrade to Liferay CE 6.0.6 a couple of week ago!
• Liferay held it's 3rd annual East Coast Symposium near Washington, D.C. last week.  The event was attended by nearly 300 people from 110 companies.  That's up from 150 people / 75 companies last year!  There have been a couple of reviews posted already here, and here.  Also new this year, Szymon from eo Networks and Artur from Vaadin were chosen as speakers from the community, and gave excellent presentations, and we had thoughtful discussions afterward on a range of topics.  Also, several announcements were made, including a partnership with MuleSoft and a Liferay/TCat bundle, FREE IPAD 2's, the Liferay Marketplace, and more!  Up next is Hungary and France, so get ready Europe!
• As you may know, Liferay is looking to release the next version of Liferay Portal, version 6.1, later this year.   We have found that engaging the community early on in the release cycle makes for higher quality and less migration issues, so I am organizing two special programs: Liferay Community Verifiers (which I alluded to in an earlier post), and The Liferay BugSquad (Juan Fernández' idea!)  Check out this forum thread, and respond if interested in participating!
• Proteon and Finalist held their second Dutch Liferay Community event this week.  Check out the slides, and let's hope someone had a camera and took some people pictures!
• CMSCritic's Mike Johnston interviewed Bryan Cheung (Liferay's CEO) about the future of the Liferay Platform.  Great interview, and I found it particularly enlightening about where Liferay is going.
• Geoff writes up a pretty good couple of articles on his experience with Liferay 6 EE here, and here.   Note the comment about a comparison between Liferay and Oracle.  I wonder if Geoff will let us know his thoughts!
• Liferay LIVE continues to offer up some great content for free to the wider community.  Recently there were discussions on Workflow (Juan wins for most number of followup questions!), Solr, and Driving Community Participation.  We're working as fast as we can to get the video replays and slides online.  If you have a topic you wish to present, please contact us and let us know!  You can present from the comfort of your own desk, and give a little back to the community.
• Olaf very successfully rounded up several community members in Stockholm for an impromptu community gathering at a local pub.  6 hours of interesting conversations and meeting new people.  I'd love to see that happen everywhere!  Keep your eyes open for more from Olaf.
• Do you ever wonder how to unit test your Liferay plugins without having to instantiate a full Liferay environment, or leave the comfort and safety of your Liferay IDE environment?  Laurent did too, and found an elegant solution.  A must read for all you TDD'ers (and others, really).
• The Java Community Process (JCP) had another round of Open Elections to fill one of the elected seats on the JCP Executive Committee.  Once again Brian Chan (Founder, and  Rollback King Chief Architect) from Liferay was nominated and took second place behind the London JUG (congrats!).  Brian has an interesting stance on the future of the JCP and I encourage you to join and vote for Brian and/or Liferay in future elections!
• MuyComputerPRO took some time to interview Jorge Ferrer, Senior Liferay Architect and Director of Liferay Spain, regarding open source, community, and Liferay's presence in Spain (interview en Español)
• ICEfaces 2.0.2 is now available, with new support for Liferay Portal CE 6.0.6 and 5.2.3.  Some of the ICEfaces components still do not work on Liferay 6, but they should be available starting in ICEfaces 2.1.  We'll keep you updated.
• Facebook integration portlet for Liferay!  Now you can stay current with Farmville and find out what your friends did last night without leaving the comfort of your Liferay Portal environment.
• Speaking of integrations, Alexey has announced an update to the popular Activiti Liferay Plugin (6.0.6.7) with support for Activity 5.5, Groovy, more samples, and other bugfixes.
• The 100 PaperCuts program marches on. Sprint 5 began last week. In sprints 1-4 we have fixed almost 40 papercuts. If you're interested in joining the team, leave comments below.  Corne, Tomas, and Juan won some sweet Liferay SWAG in the first round of prizes.  You guys should be getting those in the post in the next week (they were shipped from one of our Europe offices today!).
• Another Mobile site on Liferay: m.toulouse.fr!  Looks great! (en Français)  
• Ever wonder how you could import Wordpress content into your Liferay world?  Juan has made it easy and fun.  Wordpress Importer!
• Random tweet: @jimlmurph "VW America's Dealer portal on #Liferay est cost was 1/20th of failed portal using commercial vendor (which shall remain nameless here)"
• Groovy, Vaadin, and Liferay.  Tasty combination right?  Here is a great example of blending these fun and powerful technologies together (en Français)
• More from the Maven front: Sampsa on building Liferay itself with Maven.  
• Recent Liferay Blog Posts: ThemeDisplay access from JavaScript, Liferay ECS Highlights, Liferay Website Upgrade, Security under Remote Publishing, Liferay In Action Director's Cut, Liferay on Amazon EC2 and Elastic Beanstalk (written by me!), Hash Key Conflict, Social Visualization and Analytics (me again!).
• Recent Wiki updates: Solr, Javadoc Guidelines, Unit Tests in Plugins SDK, Installing on Weblogic, Asset Publisher, Workflow Definition, Eventing and Shared Render Parameters (my update!!), FAQ, Dutch Translation, Dynamic Query API, Multiple jQuery, 100 PaperCuts, Custom Attribute Searching, Announcements Portlet, CMS Template (Velocity), ワークフロー, 機能の拡張と変更.

That is all for now.  I'll try to do more regular roundups (like every 2 weeks).  I hope I don't have to break Twitter's storage policies :-)

[Cristhian Camilo Lopez]

Thanks James!