Community Roundup

8 Days to the official start of summer in the northern hemisphere.  2 days until the France Symposium.  That sounds like a good reason for another community roundup!  Hope everyone has a safe and fun summer season.  I have a love/hate relationship with it.  I love the summer season, but it means that from now on, the days will grow increasingly shorter and colder.  Luckily the Liferay community keeps me energized and warm.  On to the links!

• 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, and The Liferay BugSquad. Check out this forum thread, and respond if interested in participating!
• There has been a lot of interest recently around Liferay User Groups.  Liferay has maintained a list of community events for our user groups in the past, however we are going to take it a step further with the introduction of user group "homes" on liferay.org!  Groups will get a set of collaboration applications (forums, wikis, calendars, etc) and a presence on the site.  Watch for this in the next couple of weeks.
• Have a SCORM-based LMS and wish to surface its learning content in Liferay?  Arcusys has just released their SCORM module for Liferay to the community under LGPL.  Very nice work!  More background here, and here.
• The 100 PaperCuts team is taking a short breather in advance of the 6.1 release.  Many of the same volunteers have signed up for the Community Verifier and 6.1 BugSquad program (see above).  It's been great getting to know everyone, and all of your hard work is definitely appreciated by the wider community!
• The Liferay France Symposium is only days away, in beautiful Paris.  Featuring a host of Liferay experts and partners, the symposium will be a full day of discussion, demo, and use case studies.  If you are in the area, onsite registration is available!
• The Liferay Hungary Symposium was held last month, and also featured a great set of speakers.  Steve provides some detail in his blog. If you missed the event, slides are available, and pics are up! [set 1, set 2].
• On June 21, at the University of Szeged, Szeged Tech Meetup will be held, featuring discussions about Liferay.
• Interesting.  Liferay is very often used to.. well.. integrate stuff.  So Steffen's very useful blog is well-titled. 
• Swisher International designed a great corporate site on Liferay - and won an ADDY!
• Alexey and EmForge continue to give back to the community with the release of Liferay 6.0.6 AMI images for Amazon EC2.  An easy and cheap way to quickly get a manageable Liferay instance up and running!
• Alexey also provided a nice overview to Model Listener hooks for Liferay.  I'll see if I can't find time to update the wiki page.
• Speaking of giving back, it's always nice to see ideas pop up and be driven by the community.  Case in point, providing Liferay's Document Library with anti-virus scanning ability.  This idea is well on its way to completion by those involved!  Great work by all!
• Liferay LIVE continues its excellent series on all things Liferay.  This week Neil Griffin presented on Developing JSF 2 Portlets with ICEfaces, AlloyFaces, and LiferayFaces [slides now, video coming soon].  In the coming weeks we plan on doing encore presentations of several of  the East Coast Symposium presentations, so watch for those!
• In a previous life I used to work on Accessibility, so I know how much attention to detail is required to make a site fully accessible.  Liferay makes it easy, as these sites can testify.  It's way more than alt attributes :)
• Ben provides a nice overview of Liferay Layout Templates.
• translate.liferay.com continues to enjoy tremendous success, giving our community a much-needed refresh of many of the translations provided out of box.  120 users and 41 languages, and the list keeps growing!  Top translations last week included German, Croation, Basque, Japanese, and Portugese.  And now, the core Liferay Portal translations are being managed through translate.liferay.com.  Wow!
• Wondering about the benefits of an Alfresco + Liferay solution?  An interesting discussion has broken out on LinkedIn about the relative merits.  Take a look!
• Couple of JIRA updates: we turned on rich text editing last week, so now your descriptions and comments can include all sorts of cool features.  Also, you may notice two new ticket types: "Epics" and "Stories".  We are going to begin using these to track Roadmap items and finally get rid of the always-outdated-the-moment-it-is-edited Roadmap wiki page.  This way the community can see, at a glance, what's coming down the pipe!
• Creating new services using Liferay's Service Builder framework is now possible, graphically, using Liferay IDE.  This is now part of the nightly update, and slated for inclusion into the upcoming 1.3 release.  Nice work Greg et al!  [Also, a nice excerpt from Rich Sezov's Liferay in Action discusses Service Builder in detail].
• The Holy Grail of Liferay Services would be a giant book that had a chapter for each Liferay service, along with descriptions of the underlying data model used to link everything together, java, javascript, and web services APIs to access the content, descriptions of all those esoteric formal parameters, etc.  While this isn't that, it's a neat start and a nice contribution.
• Kristof provides us a fully-fleshed out example of embedded Web Content in your Liferay theme.  This keeps your editors from ever having to mess with your finely-crafted theme files!
• Our very own Juan Fernández has released his latest beast of a contribution, the Wordpress Importer!  Bring all your content from Wordpress into Liferay with one click.  Very useful!
• Interesting comparison of Liferay vs. Drupal.  Some of the items are questionable in their accuracy and even relevancy (why do we get an X next to PHP?). 
• Recent Liferay Blog Posts:  Yet Another Liferay JSON Service Example, Liferay Portal Translation Project, Igor on JSON web service improvements, Liferay Is Not A Sausage Factory, and finally Liferay.com Mobile Sites and Responsive Layouts.
• Recent Wiki Updates: Translation Team, WebDAV, JBoss Tips, Custom Logging, Accessible Sites, 100 PaperCuts, Liferay Development Style, JSON Serialization, JSON Web Services, and finally CMS Template (Velocity).

Ok, I said last time I'd do this every 2 weeks.  It's been 3 weeks.  That's an improvement from 4 weeks.  Baby steps, y'know? Finally, I'll leave you with my new desktop background pic.

[Bradley Wood]

thanks for keeping the community informed