Liferay 6.1 CE Release

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[Update: Liferay 6.1 EE has been released.  More information about Enterprise Edition can be found in Ed's blog post announcement!]

Today Liferay released the next version of its flagship software: Liferay Portal 6.1 CE! [Download] [Quick Start]

The Liferay product and engineering teams, in close concert with our awesome community, have spent many months getting the 6.1 release ready, and it is finally here.  Read below for the gory details.

Release Nomenclature

Following Liferay's versioning scheme established in 2010, this release is Liferay 6.1 CE GA1.  The internal version number is6.1.0 (i.e. the first release of 6.1).  Future CE releases of 6.1 will be designated GA2, GA3, .. and so on.  See below for upgrade instructions from 6.0 and 5.x.

Downloads

You can find the 6.1 release on the usual downloads page.  If you need additional files (for example, the source code, or dependency libraries), visit the additional files page.

New Features

In addition to the numerous bugs that have been fixed since 6.0 GA4, Many new features and improvements have gone into this release. Highlights include:

• Updated Support Matrix - Liferay's general policy is to update our support matrix for each release, testing Liferay against newer major releases of supporting operating systems, app servers, browsers, and databases (we reguarly update the bundled upstream open source libraries to fix bugs or take advantage of new features in the open source we depend on).  For example, we are moving to Tomcat 7.x, MySQL 5.5.x, JBoss AS 7, Geronimo 2.2.1, and others.
• UI Refinements - Too numerous to list here.  Many tasks that used to require a trip to Control Panel (thus losing your UI context) can now be done via the "Manage" menu.  Document Libary has gotten a sweet overhaul.  General improvements in snappiness.  
• Sites - As described in Jorge's blog and now in the official documentation, the Sites concept has been introduced, decoupling a set of pages from an associated community or organization.  This is one of the big conceptual changes in 6.1.
• Setup Wizard - To ease the first-time configuration of a portal (and its associated database), when starting a new instance of Liferay, the optional Setup Wizard will prompt for and configure these items for you.  No more mucking about with portal-ext.properties for those basic configurations everyone wants to do initially.
• Marketplace Support - Groundwork in the form of app hot deploy and marketplace browsing has been introduced into 6.1, gearing up for the opening of the Marketplace later this year.
• Mobile Device Enhancements -  For example,  mobile device rules allow you to configure sets of rules and use those rules to alter the behavior of the portal based on the device being used to access Liferay. You can also access and evaluate rules through custom scripts.
• Social Activity Improvements - Many improvements to the social value system (formerly known as Social Equity).  Check out the official documentation on what's new. 
• JSON Web Service Improvements - A lot of work has been done in this area, making it much easier to invoke Liferay's services using REST-like (AtomPub-based) JSON (e.g. through supplied JavaScript libraries, or through standard HTTP requests).  Online documentation is also available (check out http://localhost:8080/api/jsonws on your local install. Sweetness!)
• Asset Publisher Improvements - The darling of the supplied out-of-box portlets, Asset Publisher can now do things like showand publish content from/to multiple scopes, better linking behavior for assets, and many more.
• Content Management Goodness - One of Liferay's core strengths is its simple yet powerful Web Content Management System.  There have been many usability and functional improvements to it, including inline drag/drop structure editing, internationalized web content titles, preloading of structures on template creation, selection of default display pages, and more!
• Search Improvements - Lots of performance and accuracy improvements.  Including users in search results.  
• Unification of the Document Library and Image Gallery - these two apps have historically overlapped each other - that overlap has now been eliminated, by combining the two into a Documents and Media app (with a much fancier UI to boot).  
• Multiple Repository Mounting.  In the new Documents and Media app, you can now mount multiple repositories (e.g. through CMIS) and develop custom connectors to link to existing CMS repositories.  Features that overlap with Liferay are respected (e.g. permissioning, locking, etc).
• Native support for storing and serving videos and other media types - Liferay now includes preview functionality for rendering PDFs and other common document formats in-browser, eliminating the need for external apps to view.  In addition, audio and video can be captured and played back from within Liferay.
• Robust content metadata management - New metadata management tools and UIs to easily capture extra metadata related to documents, for efficient searching and categorization of documents.  Sales team uploading this year's financial data?  Let them enter the "bottom line" numbers into well defined metadata fields for easy sorting and searching.
• Establishing contextual relationships between content types - with the Related Assets feature, any asset can be dynamically related to any other asset, for easy cross-referencing.  For example, link to a document in a meeting request, or relate a forum post to a blog entry.  Relations can be mined and analyzed later.
• Enhanced staging support (including Site Branching, Versioning, and Rollback).  A major overhaul of the staging feature, Liferay allows concurrent editing of sites, with versioning and rollback (undo/redo) of changes on the fly.
• Dynamic Site and Page Templates - One can now create an entire site based on a site template.  When changes are made to the template, the changes are automatically (and smartly) applied to any derived sites.  Sites can later be unlinked if needed, allowing independent forking.
• User Customizable Pages - Allows your users to customize certain areas of a site's pages, while keeping other areas fixed.
• User Defined Lists (Dynamic Data Lists) - A very powerful feature that allows one to create a custom data list based on a user-specified schema.  Data can be extracted for reporting, or any other use.
• Unified User Management - Liferay has always had the ability to be your central directory of users.  The management of said users has not always been easy.  In Liferay 6.1, users and their associated organizations can be viewed hierarchically, allowing easy navigation into your user directory.
• OpenSocial 1.1 Support - this includes the new pub/sub feature from OpenSocial.
• Enhancements for Liferay IDE - It's never been easier to develop for the Liferay Platform, using the latest features of Liferay 6.1 and the Liferay IDE.  Liferay 6.1 now includes a remote server deployment plugin, allowing development against a remote instance of Liferay.  Simply throw a switch to publish your tested changes to a production environment.
• More social networking and collaboration feaures (too many to list them all!) - anonymous comments that are later associated with you when you sign up, follow support, related assets, social activity improvements (already discussed above), wiki images, setting threads as questions by default, and, and.. well.. just try it!
• Better Scalability
• Better Auditing, Management and Monitoring
• Better Documentation
• Better Security
• Better Quality
• ... And more!

Documentation

The Liferay Documentation Team has been hard at work updating all of the documentation for the new release.  This includes updated (and vastly improved/enlarged)  javadoc and  related reference documentation, and a  new User Guide.  You may have been watching the progress of it via its new home on github, but if not, you can access the full documentation on the documentation page.

 

Bug Reporting

As always, the project continues to use  issues.liferay.com to report and manage bug and improvement tickets.  If you believe you have encountered a bug in the new release (shocking, I know), please be cognizant of the  bug reporting standards and report your issue on issues.liferay.com, selecting the " 6.1.0 GA" release as the value for the "Affects Version/s" field.

 

Upgrading

As a general rule, you can upgrade from one release of Liferay to the next.  This means that you can upgrade from 5.2 to 6.0, or 6.0 to 6.1, but not from 5.2 to 6.1.  For 5.2 to 6.1, you would need to progress from 5.2 to 6.0, then 6.0 to 6.1.  See the Upgrading Liferay chapter of the Liferay User Guide for more detail on upgrading to 6.1.

Getting Support

Support for Liferay 6.1 CE comes from the wonderful and active community, from which Liferay itself was nurtured into the enterprise offering it is today.  Please visit the community pages to find out more about the myriad avenues through which you can get your questions answered.

Liferay and its worldwide partner network also provides services, support, training, and consulting around its flagship enterprise offering, Liferay Portal 6.1 EE, which is due to be released shortly after this CE release.

What's Next?

Of course we in the Liferay Community are interested in your take on the new features and improvements in Liferay 6.1.  Work has already begun on the next evolution of Liferay.  If you are interested in learning more about how you can get involved, visit theLiferay Community pages and dig in.  

 

 

[Cristhian Camilo Lopez]

Great!
James, I have 1 question, does liferay have an CI server ??
And why doesn't liferay have tags for each release on github ??

By the way the link on the reference to Jorge's Blog is broken "..As described in Jorge's blog and now in the official documentation....."

[Nilesh Gundecha]

Great James!! Very much impressed and happy...

[James Falkner]

@Christhian - no CI server unfortunately! We are working on adding the git tags for the pre-releases as well as the release. And I fixed Jorge's link, thanks for the heads up!

[Jack A. Rider]

Fantasic!!! I could not wait any longer, I'm already downloading. Thanks James, Thanks Liferay. Another weekend with the computer.

[Olaf Kock]

@Christhian, @Janmes: well - as far as CI servers go, AFAIK there are between 100 and 250 servers running Jenkins on many of the supported platforms (combinatoric) with different tests. I still have a conversation with our QA team on my list for Radio Liferay about their setup.
AFAIK it's not classic CI in the sense that there's one server running on every commit or nightly, but a bunch of them (literally) to test many supported permutations of infrastructure.
So I'd say this is neither a strict "yes" nor a strict "no".
And, yes, I'm also happy to hear about the release. Congratulations to everybody involved.

[Cristhian Camilo Lopez]

@Olaf @james Thanks for your answers, It would be nice if the CI build results would be available for public download, It will help to speed up the test of bug solutions and support community programs like BugSquad or Community Verifier

[Juan Gonzalez P]

Great job guys! This is an awesome Liferay version!

[James Falkner]

@Cristhian Oh I thought you meant "does liferay act as a CI server"

[Olaf Kock]

@christhian The only download that comes close to this is http://releases.liferay.com/portal/nightly/ though I believe this is only on trunk.
As the build/testservers execute all kinds of different architectures it's not as simple as the usual single server that makes the tested artifacts available for download: The test load is really spread out far to test different appservers, databases and other environments are involved.

[Abhishek Saxena]

Congratulation on the new release ............... KUDOS to the awesome Liferay team and community members.

Liferay Roscks !!!

[Syed Sadiq]

Great way to start this New Year, wonderful fete achieved! Congrats Team Liferay on another Milestone.....

[Tibor Kiss]

Congratulation!...

Is there a plan to release the maven artifacts to the oss.sonatype.org repository?

[Dana Oredson]

When can we expect Maven artifacts in Maven Central? I can install, but need these to integrate my code and themes.

[JR Houn]

@Tibor - we are working on releasing the maven artifacts as I type this comment.

[Tibor Kiss]

@JR Houn - thank you very much for the feedback! I already see that it is released at this time I am writing this.

[(あなた)]

[...] A mai napon megjelent cégünk legfontosabb szoftverének legújabb változata: a Liferay Portal 6.1 CE! (Letöltés) (Lássuk!) A Liferay termékfejlesztő- és mérnökcsapata szoros együttműködésben a projekt... [...] Read More

[Pius Onobhayedo]

Hi James,

The plugins svn repository branch (http://svn.liferay.com/repos/public/plugins/branches/) is yet to be updated with 6.1.x. Only the portal branch (http://svn.liferay.com/repos/public/portal/branches/6.1.x/) is available. Kindly publish for those of us that prefer to build from repository source.

Thanks.

[James Falkner]

Hey Pius - we are not using github to house the sources, and intend to publish tags for the various releases at github.com/liferay - the SVN repo is just a mirror of that (and lags occasionally). I'd look into moving over to git if at all possible!

[Pius Onobhayedo]

Ok James. Thanks.

[James Falkner]

Pius - tags are posted. https://github.com/liferay/liferay-portal/tags

[Ashish Renapurkar]

Great Job James .
Very informative information. Thanks for this.