Community Roundup

What's the time? It's time to get ill, with another Community Roundup! The Liferay Community has done some amazing things these last few months since the last roundup, and so here we go with another collection of things our community has been up to. On with the links!

• Mobile apps and responsive design are all the rage these days, but how does that translate to Liferay? Visit these Liferay-powered sites on your mobile and see what all the fuss is about. Also, check out this video on Mobile Apps with Liferay from last year's EU Symposium.
• As you know, last year we began the Community Verifier team, to help verify existing issues in Liferay, and clean up our JIRA database of backlogged issues. Earlier this year the team embarked on a competition to cut down the number of unverified bugs. I'm happy to report the team was able to verify over 360 of the 480 unverified bugs! The team will get free goodies and recognition for their efforts, and deserve a hearty thanks!
• Jelastic has done an excellent write-up of how to deploy a highly available Liferay Cluster to their cloud, including configuration of Nginx, Tomcat, Liferay, and MySQL (with a sharded Liferay database).
• Contributions from our community continue to roll in, with over 100 individual contributions for the upcoming 6.2 release. Edward Gonzales from Liferay's project management team has been instrumental in directing and encouraging community contributions, so if you see his name on your JIRA tickets from time to time, know that he's working to make sure contributions are treated with the respect and priority they deserve.
• Speaking of contributors, our quarterly Top Contributor awards for Q1 2013 were awarded to Oli Bayer, Gnaniyar Zubair, and Alexey Kakunin.  These three did some great work in Q1, and are examples of what our community is all about. Q2 is rapidly coming to a close, so keep those contributions coming! Bug fixes, features, translations, Marketplace apps, documentation, helping out on the forms, it all counts!
• Want to test-drive Liferay in the cloud, for free? Check out BitNami's one-click Liferay Launcher and get an hour of a Liferay server to play with (of course with options to upgrade).
• Although we get a ton of community traffic on the liferay.com forums, it is not the only place where one can get some awesome Liferay action. Check out the Liferay leaders on stackoverflow.com, who tirelessly help our community whereever they may be needed.
• Zhao made an impressive 3D Liferay rendering, suitable for desktops, and drawing the ire of branding gurus everywhere :)
• Anyone up for some LAR-gery (that's pronounced like "large-erry"). Ok, bad joke. Anyway, Terry shows you how to perform some surgery on LAR files to filter out junk and get clean data for a new Liferay instance.
• I am enjoying the random tweets mentioning Liferay that have absolutely nothing to do with Liferay. I'm sure it's some sort of scam or SEO play, but they are enjoyable for a moment. Take this one: An quotation squander temporary so that java trust in there with liferay approximation. Come again?
• Radio Liferay is back in action, with some really awesome episodes from Ville Ingman (Vaadin), Eduardo and Zeno on AlloyUI 2.0, and Zsolt Balogh on LESA. Future episodes will include myself, Jorge Ferrer, and Juan Gonzalez. If you have pressing questions you'd like answered, head over to the Radio Liferay Google+ Community and ask away!
• KL shows us some awesome Advanced Navigation techniques for your Liferay Themes, to make it easier to navigate.
• Back in April, we embarked on an interesting experiment: a 24 hour marathon tour around the world and visited Liferay Community members from almost every continent on the earth. The complete replay (along with person-by-person indexes) can be found on the Day Of Liferay page. One day I'll find time to cut and paste these into a nice summary. Also, I was very impressed with the Google Hangouts peformance, and will be using this in an upcoming regular virtual meetup (details coming soon!).
• One of our first Liferay Community Projects has graduated! Check out Project Learn on the Liferay Marketplace. Hopefully we'll see more and more community projects exposed in this way. It's a great testament to the power of open source and open collaboration.
• Getting involved with a local Liferay User Group is one of the best ways to grow your Liferay chops. New user groups in Birmingham (Alabama) and Cuba have started, and are looking for new members! If you are interested in starting your own User Group, there are new resources (and a nice video intro from Savoir-faire Linux) available on the User Group site. And don't miss our user group's upcoming events, such as India, or Hamburg.
• From the releases desk: If you're watching the releases dashboard, you'll know that there have been recent releases of Liferay Faces, Social Office, Liferay IDE, and AlloyUI! New Liferay Portal CE releases expected later this year include Liferay Portal 6.1 CE GA3 and Liferay Portal 6.2.
• Liferay Portal 6.2 is slated for release later this year, and it is packed with updates and new features. If you're interested in checking out the latest, Grab the latest Milestone build and dig in. We are quickly approaching the first Beta build of 6.2, and will once again rely on our awesome community to ferret out issues before GA.
• Standards form the backbone of today's interoperable web, and Liferay also believes strongly in their advancement. Though at times they may be slow, they are critical to our industry. Don't miss the Java EE 7 Launch broadcast tomorrow, and be on the lookout for Liferay's involvement in this important standard.
• If you're an Ubuntu fan, you may be aware of Ubutu Juju, a quick and easy way to deploy Ubuntu and its apps to public and private clouds. One such app is Liferay, whose Juju Charm is under development and will enable quick and easy deploying of Liferay, but more importantly, of wiring up dependent services like databases, app servers, load balancers, clustering support, etc. Contributions are always welcome :)
• The Liferay conference season is officially underway, with the first symposium concluding on June 6 in Paris. If you've invested time and resources into Liferay, attending a Liferay conference is the absolute best way to strengthen that investment and ensure future dividends. Look for conferences in Berlin, Frankfurt, Madrid, San Francisco, London, and Florence this fall. And don't forget to grab the companion app [iOS, Android] on the way to the conference!
• The Liferay Marketplace has relaxed its publication requirements, and the use of Liferay's Security Manager (aka PACL) is now optional, while usability issues are worked out. In the meantime, we've seen a lot of activity on the Marketplace, including over 50 community apps available now, with another 70 in the pipeline.  Keep 'em coming! And don't forget, amost every app¹ on the Marketplace is eligible to enter the Liferay Marketplace App Contest, and win a free trip to a conference or an iPad Mini. See the official rules for details (you know there had to be some, right?).
• Ideas: everyone has them, and they drive innovation into many things in life, including Software. With Liferay's Community Ideas Dashboard, we now have an easy to use tool to let our creativity loose, and socialize them throughout the community, in the hope that enterprising developers out there (including Liferay, Inc.) will run with them. Check it out, and let's hear your best ideas! Since its inception, there have been 135 ideas submitted, and the two highest vote-getting ideas have either been implemented (as a Marketplace app, thanks Rotterdam CS!) or are under development.
• You may have noticed a subtle change at liferay.com - the web team has rolled out with the first phase of a website refresh, including better performance on mobile devices (no more menus taking up half the page, and a nice slide out navigator), and improved (and localizable) headers/footers. More to come!
• Usually in this space I would list recent blog entries from Liferay staff members, since historically they were the only ones who could blog on liferay.com. That's no longer true, everyone can now blog, so check out the recent blog entries by our wonderful community, and learn something new each day!
• There have been many awesome blog posts and wiki updates, and we try to keep everyone up to date monthly via the Community Pulse newsletter. If you wish to receive this, sign up here.
• Liferay is in the running again this year for @cmscritic's 2013 Critic's Choice CMS Award! Please, take a moment to nominate Liferay for this prestigous award, and see if we can repeat again this year!
• If you're attending CMSDay, Mitarbeiterportale, Jenkins User Conference, Community Leadership Summit, OSCON, or JavaOne this year, please.. stop by and say hi!

Well, that's all I have for now. Hope everyone has a safe and fun summer (or winter, for our southern hemisphere friends)! See you on the interwebs...

[Dejan Milojevic]

+1
Thanks for a good summary James!

[Ronald Sarayudej]

Free money! Go for it!!

[Miguel Pastor Olivar]

Hey James,

I wouldn't say that the the Jelastic blog post entry is kind of fantastic: being honest, is pretty inaccurate and they are doing quite a few wrong assumptions. I have contacted them with some explanation about their errors; not sure if they will edit the blog entry at some point in the future.

Just let you know