Liferay 6.1 Beta Release

Liferay is proud to announce the Liferay 6.1 CE Beta release!  The Liferay product and engineering teams, in close concert with our awesome community, have spent many months getting the 6.1 release ready, and this is one of the final builds before it will be generally available.  We are making this release in advance of the 6.1 GA release, in order to ferret out last minute issues, and get the great work that the the teams have poured into this into your hands earlier.

New stuff since 6.0

The community has been hard at work.  Over 2500 individual issues have been resolved, and several new major and minor features make up 6.1.  Ed Chung gave a great overview of these 6.1 themes and features at the East Coast Symposium.  Here's a cheat sheet to some of the major ones (many in the community will undoubtedly be familiar with them, as you helped develop and/or review them!)

  • Multiple Repository Mounting - including CMIS 1.0 Support
  • Unification of the Document Library and Image Gallery
  • Native support for storing videos and other media types
  • Robust content metadata management
  • Establishing contextual relationships between content types (Related Assets)
  • Enhanced staging support (including Branching, Versioning, and Rollback)
  • Dynamic Site and Page Templates
  • User Customizable Pages
  • User Defined Lists (Dynamic Data Lists)
  • Workflow-enabled Forms
  • Mobile Device Detection
  • Unified User Management
  • RESTful Web Services
  • OpenSocial 1.1 Support
  • Enhancements for Liferay IDE 1.4
  • More social networking and collaboration feaures  (too many to list!)
  • Better Scalability
  • Better Management and Monitoring
  • Better Documentation
  • Better Quality
  • ..."And There's More!"

Downloads

The beta release will be available on our downloads page soon.  In the meantime, the usual files (portal bundles, sql scripts, CE plugins, and other supporting files) can be found on SourceForge: portal bundles and plugins.

6.1 Documentation

Our documentation continues to improve.  With the help of the community, our end user, administrator, and developer documentation have all improved tremendously.  The effort to document this release continues through this beta.  While the final documentation has not yet been published (it will be published with the GA release), its open source nature means you can take a look at the development, and even contribute to the "code".  If there is a specific new feature you are interested in learning about, you are encouraged to use any of the myriad avenues through which the community supports its constituents, or you can just give the Beta build a try today!

Bug reporting

If you experience issues with this beta release, and believe it to be a bug in the product, you are encouraged to file a report at issues.liferay.com.  There is a specific release to denote in the Affects Version/s field: 6.1.0 B3 (Beta-3).  The issue will be triaged, and if it has a big enough impact, will be fixed for the final GA release.

Upgrading to 6.1

As this is still a beta, you are should not use this unsupported release in a production environment.  However, it is a good way to test that your eventual upgrade will succeed with the minimum of fuss.  Several of our BugSquad members have already successfully upgraded their customized Liferay 6.0 environments to the early 6.1 builds, and this build gives you a chance to do the same.

Going Forward

As we approach the final GA release, there may be additional Release Candidate builds to fix any last minute issues.  As always, you are encouraged to participate and contribute to the project, and I hope you enjoy this sneak peek!

Blogues
SaSS and Compass make front-end theme development so much quicker and easier to read the code!
eager to see new released !!!!
To get rid of
an-unexpected-system-error-occurred

java.lang.NullPointerException

Remove the sevencogs plugins from webspps
bleeding edge, after logging in:

An unexpected system error occurred.

javax.servlet.jsp.JspException: org.apache.velocity.exception.MethodInvocationException: Invocation of method 'runtime' in class com.liferay.taglib.util.VelocityTaglib threw exception org.apache.jasper.JasperException: javax.servlet.ServletException: javax.servlet.jsp.JspException: ServletException in '/html/portlet/dockbar/view.jsp': com.liferay.portal.NoSuchLayoutException: No Layout exists with the primary key 10171 at VM_liferay.vm[line 88, column 16]

After refreshing page a few times - i got in and testing now.
@Paul thanks Paul,
After removing the sevencogs plugins from webapps, its working fine.
Muito bom, depois de remover os plugins do Sevencogs dos webapps, rodou certinho!
Thanks for that.
Had the same problem, a fresh unzip of beta 3, start tomcat, go to localhost:8080 and had:
an-unexpected-system-error-occurred
java.lang.NullPointerException.

Removed sevencogs dirs and all went fine.

Running on OS X if that makes any difference.
Thanks, Colin
@Andrius: not that I am aware of. I am going to ask someone to post these though emoticon
Saw the following error in the bundled tomcat on shutdown:
SEVERE: The web application [/opensocial-portlet] appears to have started a thread named [com.google.inject.internal.Finalizer] but has failed to stop it. This is very likely to create a memory leak.

Is the this a add-on portlet necessary for some vital feature or a sample like 7-cogs thats more more learning purposes..
Congratulationsss to Liferay Staff ...
where can one read more about the related assets functionality and potential best practice use?
Natasa - You can get a "sneak peek" of the 6.1 documentation, which describes related assets, here: https://github.com/liferay/liferay-docs/blob/master/userGuide/en/chapters/04-liferay-collaboration-suite.markdown
Liferay CE 6.1.0 RC1 has bug after a fresh installation in Tomcat 7.x:

[...]
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.liferay.taglib.util.ThemeUtil.include(ThemeUtil.java:93)
at com.liferay.taglib.theme.IncludeTag.doEndTag(IncludeTag.java:39)
at org.apache.jsp.html.common.themes.portal_jsp._jspx_meth_liferay_002dtheme_005finclude_005f0(portal_jsp.java:465)
at org.apache.jsp.html.common.themes.portal_jsp._jspService(portal_jsp.java:418)
... 123 more
05:07:02,508 ERROR [error_jsp:427] User ID null
05:07:02,509 ERROR [error_jsp:428] Current URL /
05:07:02,511 ERROR [error_jsp:429] Referer null
05:07:02,515 ERROR [error_jsp:430] Remote address 127.0.0.1
05:07:02,516 ERROR [error_jsp:432] javax.servlet.ServletException: javax.servlet.jsp.JspException: java.lang.NullPointerException
javax.servlet.ServletException: javax.servlet.jsp.JspException: java.lang.NullPointerException
[...]

Too bad, specially after 1 year without an official CE edition. More support to community please.
Fabio - can you file an issue at issues.liferay.com and include the exact steps you used to uncover this bug? I've been unable to reproduce it.