Community Roundup

It's that six dot one bump, make you put yo hands up - Make you put yo hands up, put yo, put yo hands up

Welcome to another installment of Community Roundup!  Your source for a digest of the goings-on in the Liferay Community.  I apologize for the delay, I am targeting a one month period, and promise to do better next time!  It is taking about 6 hours per roundup to sift through the mountain of coolness in the Liferay community. We have lots of material to cover, so sit back, relax, and start your clicking or tapping.

• Last week, the Liferay Community enjoyed a fantastic 48 hours in sunny Southern California for Liferay's 3rd-annual West Coast Symposium.  As emcee, I was able to attend the first and last 10 minutes of each Track A session.  I will do a wrap-up in a separate post, but wanted to give a special shout-out and congratulations to Cignex Datamatics and Savior-faire Linux, recipients of the first ever Liferay Community Excellence Award for their outstanding achievements and contributions to our community! More coverage from WCS here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and...... wait for it... here.
• If you attended my Community Talk at WCS (slides available soon), you'll be aware of many of the upcoming features we are working on for you.  Jamie Sammons from CDS Global was kind enough to get up on stage with me and discuss his role in our community, and I described the upcoming features: Community Blogging, Incubation Projects, Community Verifier, a real Ideation site, Badges and Achievements, and new Developer On-Ramp videos.  Good times!
• With WCS behind us, it is time to look forward to the "Final 3" -- Europe (Frankfurt), Spain (Madrid), and Italy (Rome).  If you have a chance to attend any of these, you will be pleasently surprised at the highest ever quality content to date.  These symposiums are a great opportunity to meet and engage the leaders and active participants in our community.  See you there!
• We are coming up on the close of the Liferay 6.1 chapter in the epic book of Liferay.  At WCS, we announced availability of a Liferay 6.1 release candidate build on October 14, but if you are participating in Community BugSquad, of course you have already reviewed the sneak-peek 6.1 builds, and several of your feedbacks/suggestions/fixes/improvements have already been incorporated, with more to come!  We are in the final approach to the 6.1 landing, so get your vote in now to get your favorite issues resolved.
• Speaking of epic books: Manning has finally begun printing copies (and making e-books available) of Rich Sezov's Liferay In Action - THE definitive guide to Liferay Portal, covering all of the latest features of the Liferay 6.1 platform.  I saw a couple of copies floating around at WCS, and Rich was kind enough to autograph mine, and you can get yours today! 
• Looking to put your newfound skills from WCS and Liferay In Action to good use?  Liferay Hungary has initiated an awesome program for University students: Liferay Code Camp 2011!  Meet professionals and other students, Write some code, get some real-world experience on a large software engineering project, and win a trip to Los Angeles or Madrid.
• More greatness from (and for) the community: Radio Liferay!  A podcast series from Olaf Kock, covering the world of Liferay in human terms - a conversation with interesting people from in and around Liferay. Check out and subscribe to the feed.  Radio Liferay Episodes [3] [2], and [1(me!!)] are available now.
• Liferay's Community Leadership Team had its second meetup in July, with the next one in mid-October.  You can find the minutes here.  Attended by 11 of the community's leaders, we had discussions ranging from community programs, to user groups, and an interesting discussion around "What Motivates the Community?".  The follow-up discussion thread is very interesting.
• Harpreet from Cloudbees shows us how to deploy Liferay onto a cloud in 15 minutes.  If you saw his presentation at WCS, then this is old news, but still awesome!  
• Dynamic Data Lists is a marquee feature in 6.1 - Mark shows us why.
• Going to Oracle OpenWorld this year?  Liferay will be there (Moscone South - Booth 110 - behind the MySQL Demo Grounds), and is proud to be a Gold Sponsor at the first Jenkins User Conference.  Liferay uses Jenkins extensively for it's Continuous Integration process, and we look forward to meeting others who want to find out more about Jenkins and Liferay! Read more about our use of Jenkins in Harpreet's blog entry.
• If you've browsed liferay.com on your mobile, you may have noticed the layout is different.  In fact, in a desktop browser, if you squeeze the website thinner and thinner, the layout will dynamically adjust (and images are changed, and so on).  This is a mobile responsive layout, and now you can use it, by grabbing it from here!
• I don't normally re-post job listings, but this one caught my attention.  You simply show up (walk in) between 9a and 6p, work on a Liferay project, and get paid.  That's like fast food for Liferay developers.  Only reversed...  Sort of.  Interesting concept nonetheless!  Nice to see a proliferation of Liferay jobs.  Heh.. get it?  Pro-life-eration -- Liferay.  *groan*
• Liferay Developers who want to use Maven with the Plugins SDK - Over at DZone, Kamesh explains how to do it.
• jQuery is a nice toolkit for javascript developers - see how to easily integrate it into your portlets by reading Alexey's blog post.
• I've seen How to Change Company Logo Liferay Portal 6.x on Twitter about a zillion times.  Occasionally the profile picture of the person re-tweeting this is a famous inventor or some celebrity.  Perhaps it is a cry for help, or to get on Community Roundup.  So here it is.  Now we can all change our company logos!  I just changed mine.  There, I did it again!
• Liferay Community User Group activity continues to rise.  We are up to 10 groups, with a few more in the pipeline.  New groups include Austin, Netherlands, and Italy.  Spain already held a first meetup (minutes here, en Español, and excelente tee shirt pic here).  Contact [e-mail] if you wish to start your own!
• Ever wanted to open your portlet up in a modal (or non-modal) dialog in Liferay?  It's pretty easy!  And it's extensively used in Liferay 6.1 so that you don't lose context when visiting the various administrative interfaces.  
• If you need direct database access from your Liferay plugin, look no further.  Daniel shows us the (easy) way.
• Easy integration of OpenDJ and Liferay by profiq. I particularly like Liferay's UI for configuring LDAP and several other integration options.  *cough* database configuration *cough*.
• A lot of the administrative interfaces in Liferay are driven by the Search Container API - simply showing a list of something and allowing actions on the individual items or in bulk.  If you've created new users, sites, or virtually any other portal entity in Liferay, you've used a Search Container.  If you want to create one for your custom entities, look no further than Daniel's excellent blog, and this post in particular.
• OpenXava 4.2.3 is now available!  OpenXava allows you to define business applications with simple POJOs, JPA and Java 5 annotations.  Here's a nice (though dated) wiki article on how to integrate OpenXava into Liferay.
• Liferay working with Java 7!  Though Java 7 might not be ready for primetime, Liferay works well (with a few caveats).
• Liferay only good for intranets?  Not so, says Szymon (and I happen to agree :) ).  This site runs Liferay.
• Soft Shake 2011 will take place October 3-4, in Geneva.  This year, Liferay will get some coverage via Vaadin's Sami Ekblad, with a discussion on Rich Portlets in Liferay 6 with Vaadin.  Stop by and say Hi if you're there!
• A Liferay event hosted by Smile in Paris a couple of weeks ago attracted a lot of community members to learn more, and Guillaume provides a nice wrap-up of the event (en français).
• Uh oh.. here comes the Android crowd!  Aritz shows us how to easily talk to Liferay from your Android device.
• Well, this is interesting.  A PortletBuilder tool (akin to ServiceBuilder) - building Portlets based on XML definitions!  THanks Mark Polly!
• Liferay does not discriminate in its support for various UI frameworks.  Stack traces from all are equally long :-)  But GWT is a popular one (Vaadin in fact is built on it).  Here's a great tutorial on using GWT and making instanceable portlets using it.
• Wow.. a great contribution by Holistic Security!  Calling Alfresco Webscripts from Liferay w/AJAX.  A complete solution, including downloadable binaries!

New Blog Posts: Ehcache Configuration, Spain Symposium Details, Radio Liferay Episodes [3] [2], and [1(me!!)], Spring Contexts, DL Record Plugin, Liferay & OSGi, Utilizing Instance Storage on EC2, Adding Workflow Portlets to a Page, Community Activity Map (me!!), Activity Map Explained, Themes Settings and Advanced Controls, Liferay WCS and Jenkins User Conference, The Myth of Free Open Source Portals, Theme JSP Overrides, JSP Include Buffer, Changing Context Path, Apoyando a Unicef en la campaña del Cuerno de África, Test JARs, Controlling Content, Changing Default Column Target for Drag 'n Drop, Community Stats (me again!!).  Dang.  Once we enable blogging for the entire community, I may have to stop this bit :)

Recent Wiki Updates: Introduction to Liferay, JSON Web Services, Non-Standard Timezones, JBPM, AlloyUI Forms, Websphere 6.1 Tips, Application Servers, Custom Queries in 5.2, Liferay IDE 1.4 Plan, Liferay Hooks, Translation Team, Solr, Web Content Velocity Variables, URL Parameters, Contributing, Database Configuration.

Looking forward to meeting many of you in Frankfurt and Madrid!  I will leave you with two teaser videos produced for this year's symposium.  First, a recap of where we are at Liferay:

Finally, a recap of day 1 from WCS:

Enjoy!