Community Roundup

Hello Liferay Community!  It's been over 3 months since my last roundup, and for that I again apologize.  Seems like I start each one of these with an apology.  It's been a rather busy start to this year for Liferay, so I hope you'll forgive me as I try to separate the wheat from the chaff and present you once again, for your clicking pleasure, all the happenings in the Liferay world.  Let the show begin!

• Liferay 6.1 CE was released earlier this year, and since then it's been downloaded over half a million times!  From the community perspective, this is fantastic news - it puts the technology in front of many, and hopefully the community will see some ROI from that :)  In addition, for our enterprise customers, Liferay 6.1 EE is also now available.
• We have also experienced great growth in the community in terms of raw numbers, and this year we are also looking at increasing the quality, not just the quantity, of community initiatives and contributions.  It should be an exciting 2012!
• The 2012 Symposia planning is well underway, with events planned in Stockholm, Budapest, Paris, San Francisco, Madrid, and Frankfurt, with more being planned.  If you have a chance to attend, it's a great way to meet the community and learn a little something too!  If you really want to give back, submit a paper for one of the many call for papers that are now open! If you can't attend a symposium, you may also be interested in learning about Liferay at one of the many Roadshows that start this month.
• Besides Liferay-centric events, you'll find us in various places around the world, attending, sometimes sponsoring, sometimes giving talks, and it's great to meet fellow enthusiasts outside of our regularly scheduled events.  If you're in the Chicago area next month, check out CMSExpo, where Liferay is 1 of 3 featured CMS's! You'll also find us (or would have!) at CeBIT (with e-Spirit), OSCON, JavaOne, and many others.  
• I know I like to talk about our awesome community in general terms, but it's the individual accomplishments and contributions that make it so awesome.  We are now recognizing individual achievements through the Liferay Contributor Awards.
• Olaf continues to provide visibility into our community, through a regular podcast.  Most recently, Radio Liferay has featured Bruno Farache (aka Bruno Admin), Juan Fernández (Core Engineer and active Community guy), Michael Young (One of Liferay's Founders), Jeffrey Handa (Training), Greg Amerson (of IDE fame), and a host of others.
• Apoorva has written many good articles on Liferay, the latest of which deals with caching of custom portlet data in Liferay.  
• Have a question about Liferay front-end technologies?  Ask Bradley.  His Liferay Tips site is full of interesting tidbits of usefulness!
• More Liferay User Groups are popping up!  We welcome new groups in Morocco, San Jose, Belgium, France, and India!
• Speaking of user groups, the Liferay Spain User Group hosted a community event in Alicante back in January.  Rather than read minutes, check out the tweets coming from participants!  In addition, UK, Austin, DC, and many others are hosting events near you.  Keep an eye on the Community Events page for upcoming events.
• Liferay Github Developers rejoice!  We now have tags on our repositories.
• Our Liferay Community is but one of many in the software industry.  Roland (from Nuxeo) recently talked with community managers from several open source communities (including ours!), and wrote a nice piece on the practice of community management.  Part 2 of this is also available.
• The Liferay BugSquad team was instrumental in implementing and refining many of the features found in Liferay 6.1.  After a short breather taken after the release, we are gearing up to get back into the action.  More details coming soon!
• David Caron shows how easy it is to use the Vaadin UI Framework with Liferay.  Vaadin makes it easy to make very compelling, responsive web apps!
• The Community Verifier team went on a rampage earlier this year, verifying and triaging over 350 bugs in a few short weeks.  Kudos to the whole team, and to Drew Blessing who took home the coveted title of "Contributor of the Month" for February. 
• Our fearless community champion Ray continues his adventure.  Check out his new outfit!
• Get your latest Liferay news and community activities through your favorite Android device.  Check out Liferoid Lite!
• Liferay strives to keep up with new initiatives in the standards space. Liferay has of course been invoved in past standards efforts, such as JSR-168, JSR-286, CMIS, and more. Liferay is once again participating in the (free to all) upcoming OASIS standard around WEMI (Web Experience Management Interoperability). The title may be buzz-wordy, but the goals are not. If interested, get involved!
• Liferay is Java-based, but you don't have to be a Java expert to use it or create websites with it.  In fact, suppose you are a Scala expert?  Miguel demonstrates that even Scala fits into the Liferay world. Also, node.js + Liferay.  Cool!
• Wear your Liferay colors with pride, and choose from a vast array of products emblazened with the Liferay logo in our CafePress online store.  All products are prized to move, so act now!  But seriously... there is no markup on any item!
• Earlier this year, the community began accepting new Liferay Community Projects - since then several have popped up, including a Facebook Integration project, OSGi bridges, Project Learn, and there are more in the pipeline.  It's a great way to get involved in open source!
• For the JSF fans: Liferay is assuming leadership of the portletfaces.org project.  Check out the new Liferay Faces Project page for details.
• Somewhat random tweet:  Jonny Olliff-Lee: Today @FlizLovesKon solved a tricky problem in #Liferay, while showing what I love & dislike about Open Source Software! Well done dude!
• Maven mavens can now rely on Liferay's Maven Artifacts.  Also, check out the Maven documentation for tips on getting started with Liferay and Maven.  Jan Gregor will also do a LIVE webinar on this subject next week.
• Liferay has been talking about App Marketplaces for a few years now, and with much fanfare we announced the Liferay Marketplace last year.  It's been a while in the making, but we should see the first public beta later this month!  In advance of that, Brian Kim (COO of Liferay) has written a nice article for ECommerce Times talking about marketplaces in general.
• The always entertaining and informative blogger Dana Blankenhorn writes about Liferay's "Comfort of Normal Business". It's spot-on.
• XMLPortletFactory has been upgraded to work with Liferay 6.1.  This is a nice tool to generate CRUD Liferay Apps (including source!) from XML definitions. 
• If you're into workflows and Activiti, check out this handy tutorial on how to integrate it with Liferay.
• After more than 400 downloads of the previous versions and good feedback from several users around the world, Juan released a new version of the Wordpress Importer Portlet (1.2).  Check it out!
• Have you ever wondered how to connect Liferay to a different database?  Well, wonder no more: here's how to do it with the Plugins SDK.
• You may have noticed increased participation in social media sites such as Wayin [More Info].  We're expanding our reach beyond forums and other traditional outlets, so get involved!  Check out our new Facebook "Community Input" page - powered by Wayin.
• You may have also seen Liferay stacks available through BitNami.  Now, with a couple of clicks, you can enable a Liferay-powered cloud hosting environment through BitNami Cloud Hosting.  Coooool!
• Interested in some highly technical, yet informative presentations (Tech Talks) from the folks in Spain?  Check out this tech talk repository.  "You will find slides, source code examples, and much more about HTML5, programming languages, cloud computing, and other crazy stuff"
• Liferay is often used for building all kinds of sites.  As an example of its social prowess, and to see what it might be like to combine Pinterest, Amazon, and Facebook, check out what CMS Report has to say about Social Umami!
• Wow, a super-handy reference for jQuery/YUI/AlloyUI developers.  How do you do jQuery's $('div.foo:first') in AlloyUI? Why, it's A.one('div.foo') of course!  And many more..
• Interesting way to map out the various Liferay apps out there.  PealTrees is like a roadmap of.. well.. things.  Here's the Liferay corner :)
• TheServerSide has some nice coverage of Liferay, from Vivek's "10 Reasons to Love Liferay" to Cameron's "5 neat things".
• Liferay 6.1 brings with it the ability to mount multiple content repositories (e.g. CMIS, Documentum, Sharepoint, etc).  And now Tomas brings the ability to mount OS filesystems!  Yes, this means you can finally get rid of your OS desktop and use a browser and Liferay for everything! ;-)
• I know that you are lamenting the fact that the built-in WYSIWYG editor in Liferay (CKEditor) does not have the out of box ability to write complex math formulas.  Lament no more, with this nice plugin.
• One piece of FUD often heard regarding open source is that it is of lower quality, because so many people hack on it for so long.  Not so, for open source as a whole.  
• Recent Blogs: Again, there are too many to list, just visit or subscribe to blogs.liferay.com and you'll be set.  Faces, McNealy on Liferay, Contributor Awards(Me!), Scala, Europe Symposium CFP, Maven Themes, Faceted Search, SAML, Kaleo Actions, and more!
• Recent Wiki page updates: Liferay Developer, IntelliJ, Web Services, CMIS, WebDAV, Websphere 8, and much, much more (too many to list)

I hope you find this aggregration of interesting community news useful.  And I promise to keep them coming as often as possible.  I'll leave you with this bit of humor:

“Twitter is a great place to tell the world what you’re thinking before you’ve had a chance to think about it.” - Chris Pirillo

[Jay Patel]

James even though it's been 3 months since your last round up, it's worth spending time to read everything you post. Thanks for summary once again..

[Tejas Kanani]

As always !!! Very useful & interesting post.
Thanks James.

[Apoorva Prakash]

Hi James,
Thanks for appreciating my work.
Regards,
Apoorva Prakash

[Thomas Hirsch]

Unfortunately the link to "ability to mount OS filesystems! " seems to be broken.
How to get more information about this?

[James Falkner]

Thomas - the link points to the (legacy) software repository which has been superceded by the Marketplace - unfortunately not all previous plugin authors have ported their apps to Marketplace - but for this one, you can grab the plugin from https://github.com/topolik/FSRepo/downloads and read more about it here: https://github.com/topolik/FSRepo