Community Roundup

Guess what?  It's time for another Community Roundup!  I know it's been a while since the last roundup.  It's been quite a busy last few months in the Liferay Community.  We saw the release of several Liferay product updates, the soft opening of the Liferay Marketplace, and several new initiatives in the community.  I'll try to cover as much as I can, filtering only the best for you, with lots of links to keep you informed and up to date.  On with the show!

  • The fall event season is heating up.  I don't get out much, so it's nice to be able to connect an online identity to a real person every once in a while.  Liferay is active in community meetups and industry events -- you may have seen us at this year's OSCON, and read below for details on local community meetups happening around the world.  Many events are free to attend (like our community meetups), so don't hesitate to come say hi if you can! We will also be at Gartner's PCC in London, the Jenkins User Conference in San Francisco, JavaOne (also in SF), the AFCEA Fort Knox Industry Day, and then the entire month of October (and some of November) you'll find 4 Liferay Symposiums in a row - San Francisco, Frankfurt, Madrid, and Milan.
  • Speaking of symposiums, last year we began to accept topic submissions from our community.  Last year, at the US symposiums, I believe we got around 5 submissions.  This year, it was close to 30.  I'm guessing the European symposiums are seeing a similar increase!  I was shocked and awed at this.  And they weren't run of the mill sales pitches, these were real technology and community discussions, which I'm sure made it tough on the organizers to choose.  You can see the program listings: [North America, Europe, Spain] and I highly encourage you to attend at least one.  The Spain and Europe CFPs are still open, so be sure to submit if you've got a topic you wish to present.
  • The much anticiated opening of the Liferay Marketplace finally arrived in late July.  The Liferay Marketplace is the new place for our community to share, browse, and download Liferay-compatible apps.  You can find all of Liferay's supported plugins, and in the near future you will be able to upload your own applications, and make them available on the Marketplace.  Next week (August 27-31), Liferay will host several live sessions in multiple languages and timezones to discuss how you can use the Marketplace and what you can do with it today, and what's coming up.  I highly recommend you attend at least one!
  • Also on the release front, we saw the release of Liferay Social Office 2.0 CE.  A much needed refresh of the Social Office product, this new release has too many new features to go over here.  It looks really great, so give it a go!
  • July also saw the release of Liferay Portal 6.1 CE GA2 and EE GA2.  This update brought several important updates to the platform, including support for the aforementioned Marketplace, and important security updates.
  • Security is very important to anyone who uses Liferay, and the newly-formed Community Security Team has taken on the task to educate developers on security, and help to find, fix, and notify the community about security issues in Liferay.  If you are interested in learning more or joining this effort, contact the team today!
  • 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.  The team has donated a huge amount of their time, and has verified/triaged over 370 issues since January.  Well done!
  • Juan Gonzalez (aka juangon) is a very active in our community and is always willing to contribute, whether it's on the forums, the Community Security Team, or even on other open source projects.  Most recently, he collaborated with the fine folks on the XMLPortletFactory to integrate it with Liferay's built-in workflow engine.  Check out Liferay XMLPortletFactory Workflows!
  • Participation in our community is one of the best ways to get to know the technology.  Contributions, no matter how small, should be treated as a gift to the community, and we have not done a great job to date of shepharding those contributions into the project.  In an effort to improve this, Drew Blessing has kicked off a new effort in the Community Verifier program to pair up contributors, community verifiers, and Liferay core engineers, and get those contributions flowing once again.  But we need your help!  If interested in joining the CV program, please join this thread and get involved!
  • Shout-out to our 2012 Q2 Top Contributors: Jelmer, Tejas, and Amit have been kicking butt in their own special ways in our community, and I want to personally thank them for their efforts.  Of course everyone who contributes should be commended, and so I look forward to Q3 and beyond.
  • Olaf continues to provide visibility into our community, through his regular podcast.  Most recently, Radio Liferay has featured Jim Hinkey on Javadocs, 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.
  • More Liferay User Groups are popping up!  We welcome new groups in Denver (US), New York/New Jersey (US), Dortmund (DE), and Twin Cities (US).
  • User Group activity is picking up across the world.  India held their first and second meetups in Pune and Ahmedabad, and plans for Bangalore later this year.  The UK is lighting up as well, with meetups planned for September.  Spain, Netherlands, Dortmund, Austin, Denver, Twin Cities, and Belgium also have (or recently had) events - check their pages for details, and get to know your local Liferay community!
  • CMSWire recently held a discussion: "Does Open Source Encourage and Support Innovation?".  This is of course very important to understand when considering Open Source for your business.  We in the community of course believe in it, but it's nice to see an external perspective.  Of course, the only vendors consulted were open source, but the arguments made are sound in this blogger's opinion!
  • 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 4-part piece on the practice of community management. [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4].
  • Our fearless community champion Ray continues his adventure.  Who is this mysterious hero that keeps saving Ray?
  • There are new, custom designed Liferay teeshirts available at cost (no markup) at Liferay's CafePress online store.  These were designed by our very own Bryan Ho!  Women's and Men's sizes and fits available.  You can even get a onesie for your little one.  Also, I heard a rumor of a 3rd design that was never published and is really hard to find - if you find it, let me know.
  • Earlier this year, the community began accepting new Liferay Community Projects - since then several have popped up, the latest of which is a handy JavaScript utility belt for Liferay Developers: Rogers.js.
  • Thanks to YOU, our Liferay Community, we have been voted #1 for SourceForge.net's July Project Of The Month!  Check out the interview with Brian Chan, one of the Liferay founders, who was instrumental in us finding and continuing to use SourceForge as the home for Liferay downloads back in the stone ages of Liferay.  I was very happy to see so many of you lend your voice.  We beat SugarCRM!  And I now have 94 new and useless Twitter accounts.  Just kidding.
  • Wasim continues to contribute some great work in the area of user experience in his blog.  Liferay 6.1 Theme Initializer 2? Yes, please!
  • Random tweet: @simonfeesh Totally geeking out today. Am absolutely impressed with @liferay. Wow. Makes other CMS platforms look ordinary.
  • Mobile is still in its infancy.  There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.  One of the tenants of Liferay's design is that it gives you the choice about how to do many things, including mobile support.  Two articles stuck out recently: Milen describes how to use the Mobile Device Detection in Liferay 6.1.  And Tony Byrne from Real Story Group explains the choices one must make when designing for Mobile using Liferay. Both nice articles (be sure to read Nate's comment on Tony's article!).
  • Jignesh has very useful tidbits of Liferay Developer goodness.  I particularly like the coverage of AlloyUI and Liferay's WCM.
  • Jelmer gives us some nice tips / best practices for Liferay development.  If your Liferay project involves continuous deployment of Liferay and your plugins, there are some nice tips here.
  • Liferay held a Twitter contest back in May - you can read more about it on the results page, but what I was particularly happy about was that the prizes chosen were characterized as "Cool and baffling" :)
  • FancyBox Portlet anyone?  Davide brings us this interesting visualization tool for Liferay (using jQuery).
  • As you know, earlier this year the PortletFaces project was moved under the Liferay Community umbrella, headed up by Neil Griffin.  The Liferay Faces project has just had their first GA release of Liferay Faces, welcome news for JSF+Liferay users.  Also, check out the nice demos page if you're wondering what Liferay Faces can do for you!
  • The Liferay IRC channel (#liferay on FreeNode) has been picking up steam - we're up to around 30 people at peak times (generally Monday morning for some reason) and maybe 15 or so 'regulars'.  Come join us!  I wonder if we should start up bi-weekly meetups!  For Hungarian users, we now have a #liferay-hu channel as well!
  • Liferay IDE 1.6 has recently been released, with awesome new features for developers like automatic source attachment for handy debugging, new support for JSF Projects, ServiceBuilder enhancements, and other community contributions. Nice job Greg and team!
  • Tejas (one of our most active contributors recently) also maintains his own blog - most recently discussing the creation of Portlet URLs from Theme template code.  Thanks Tejas!
  • Dave Nebinger shows how you can integrate Piwik (open source analytics) with Liferay.  I came across Piwik back in my Community Equity days, and it is a really nice solution for tracking visitors and gathering nice looking data. Thank Dave!
  • Speaking of monitoring things, what about monitoring Liferay itself?  Mika has a nice article on using Nagios, Jolokia, and JMX4Perl, complete with fully functional configuration examples.
  • New Blog Entries: Cincinatti Film Festival and Liferay, Custom Footer Navigation, Maven and GA2, 6.1 Development Guide, Liferay Open Development, Workflow Context Variables, and many more.  Also, I know I've promised this for a while now, but we are making progress on opening up liferay.com blogs for the entire community.  Stay tuned!
  • New Wiki Updates: Community Verifier Contributors, Using Custom Fields, User Feedback, Contributing using Git and Github, Getting Started as a Developer, and many more.
That's all I have for you today, folks.  Thanks again to our amazing community that keeps giving and keeps me going.  Until next time!
 
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Wow, that's an impressive list. And thanks for the "regular" - I promise to get back into the habit of publishing: It's harder when the habit has been broken once.
Thanks James for sharing this, "Community Round-up" is the one blog I can not afford to miss reading emoticon
@Jay - Thanks! I actually enjoy doing them, even though it takes several hours to sift through things.

@Olaf - No worries. Can't wait to see what's in store for Radio Liferay emoticon
Thanks James for putting me on the list emoticon
Now Liferay collaboration activities becomes my habit and want to try little bit more....
Thanks James !!! And as always interesting & very useful overview of what is going on around Liferay.
And Thanks for appreciating my blog sharing. Feels glad to see my contribution is helping LR Community and looking forward to it.