Community Roundup

Hi all, it's time for another installment of your linky-linky Community Roundup!  It's been quite busy in the community and at Liferay.  Community activity is buzzing and we are gearing up for various Fall events and activities, starting off with our annual West Coast Symposium in California, where there will be several key announcements, including the unveiling of Liferay 6.1, availability of the Liferay Marketplace, and several new and innovative event features that I guarantee you'll love (more on this later), so put down your ice cream and get registered! You will not want to miss this one.

Now, on to the links.

• We recently launched Liferay User Group spaces on liferay.com!  User Groups have been an important part of Liferay's community-based growth the last 3-4 years.  Now they have homes on liferay.com.  We are starting small, with an information page, calendar, and forum.  Later on, we plan on expanding this to a full-blown collaboration site, with full web content and collab tools.  Spain, Austria, Slovakia, Czechia (yep that's right!) lead off the charge, followed by Germany, Italy, and Indonesia soon.  If you want to start a user group, or have an existing user group that wants to be listed here, let me know!
• Liferay's Community has really stepped up for BugSquad - over 45 volunteers and the list continues to grow.  We are completing the feature reviews for the 6.1 release and beginning the actual bug squashing.  If interested in joining up, leave a comment here or in this thread!
• Liferay's Community Leadership Team had its second meetup last month.  You can find the minutes here.  Attended by 11 of the community's leaders, we had discussions ranging from community programs, to user groups, and an interesting discussion around "What Motivates the Community?".  The follow-up discussion thread is very interesting.  Why do you participate?  What do you want to get out of it?  
• In case you missed it, Liferay and Alfresco teamed up to do the first ever dual broadcast of a webinar, broadcasted over both Liferay's LIVE system and Alfresco's system, to great success. Questions were taken over both systems, as well as Twitter, and participants learned a bunch too :) Slides here and recording here!
• I found this an interesting read by a Drupal user investigating using Liferay.  Good responses all around, and a Liferay fan steps in to give details for Liferay.  In the end, it came down to MS SQL support (?).  Anyway, a fun read, even if a bit dated.
• Hey Londoners On Liferay (LOL) - Join the new London Liferay Meetup group and the upcoming London LUG (Liferay User Group)!  Phil has started the new group and is planning on a face-to-face meetup soon.
• Liferay and iSOCO organized the first "Liferay Dream Day" (en Español)  - bringing together professionals from all over Spain to discuss the future of the Liferay Platform.  Successful event, and hopefully there is more to come! Also, see Jorge's blog post about this topic.
• Interested in presenting at Liferay's Europe Symposium in October?  Act fast, the CFP closes September 15!
• Liferay IDE 1.3 has been released!  Eclipse Indigo, Remote Deployment, Vaadin, Alloy Taglib support, and many more features.  A very nice way to quickly create and manage Liferay projects.
• From the world of event management, the DISI '11 site runs on Liferay.
• Ever wanted to embed a portlet within a portlet?  For example, including a built-in useful portlet into your portlet's UI?  Bert shows you how.
• Interesting blog post title and feedback from the Hungary Symposium: "User Feedback Gives Rise to Liferay 6.1".  Yes, in fact, we do take tons of community feedback into Liferay!
• Have you been following Ray?  He's in deep .... trouble.  Like him on Facebook to help the poor guy out, or send him a tweet!
• Wow!  Thanks Mimacom!  A nice tool to help migrate your Liferay deployments to new context paths.  Hopefully they can put this in the Liferay Marketplace :)
• Random tip for Liferay and JSF: Redirect during Render Phase!
• Looking to deploy Liferay on your favorite cloud VM?  BitNami makes a VM-ready virtual image of Liferay 6.0.6 CE along with a bunch of graphical management tools.  JumpBox also makes a sweet bundle available along with their management tools.
• I did a presentation on NoSQL @ Liferay at OSCon 2011.  Lots of good questions afterward.  If you are interested in non-traditional data stores (and really, who isn't?), check out my slides and ask questions!  Next week I'm gonna do a detailed blog post about the research involved and the results.
• Speaking of MongoDB, Prashant has created an interesting ServiceBuilder-like tool called MongoJ that converts entity definitions in XML into a Java ORM for use with MongoDB.  
• Laurent gives us a nice intro to Liferay Permissions in his experiment.  
• Attention Costa Rica!  The next Java User's Group (CRJUG) features a Liferay presentation by Anibal Gomez.
• Apoorva discusses the Plugins SDK and MVC Portlets in Liferay 6.
• Ok, we at Liferay have been buzzing over the 50 Liferay Interview Questions.  I guess posting a definitive set of answers would defeat the purpose for recruiters/interviewers :)  And a few of them might be tricky.. Combining this with the growth of Liferay jobs means you're certain to get a job somewhere if you are an active member of our community and can answer many of these!
• Dynamic Queries in Liferay is a powerful feature allowing you to get at Liferay content in ways never imagined by the original authors.  And in Liferay 6, you can even nest sub-queries.  Mykola has a nice demonstration of this.
• Following up, Mykola has also posted a set of cool tips and tricks for developing on Liferay.  Worthy of a bookmark IMO.
• Random Tweet: Aaron Paxson : The more I "play* with #liferay, the more I love it more than #plone. I guess it doesn't hurt that I prefer Java over Python
• Workflow in Liferay.  Kaleo.  Juan. A hands-on introduction video!    
• Liferay is compatible with many reporting engines, one of which is BIRT, an open source reporting engine developed through the Eclipse Foundation.  In this blog (en Español), Manuel shows us how to easily integrate to make nice looking reports in Liferay.
• Color Schemes in Liferay are an easy way to provide customization to a site without having to create a full-blown theme.  Check out this example of how to easily create them.
• Another nice walkthrough of creating a portlet using Liferay IDE.  Thanks Alvin!
• Aig has ported his Zeep o'Tron to Liferay 6.  If you don't know what this is (really?), check out his earlier posts [1, 2, 3].
• Sami and I have teamed up to bring you another DZone Refcard - this time on Liferay and Vaadin.  Check out "Mastering Portal UI Development With Vaadin and Liferay".
• Suez Environment: running on Liferay open source (winning over closed-source competitors like Microsoft Sharepoint and IBM Websphere).  Way to go Ippon! (En Français)
• If you missed the France Symposium, the slides are now available at the symposium site.
• Want to create customized content for mobile devices, or change the theme based on specific device capabilities?  Look no further than Liferay multidevice extensions, an open source library for doing device detection specific for Liferay.  Cool!
• Luca shows us how to easily publish Liferay content to Facebook, using built-in tools.  
• Vaadin, Clujure, and Liferay.  An interesting blog by Bluesoft.
• New Liferay Blog Posts: Debugging SQL Queries, Liferay IDE, CFP For Europe Symposium, Monitoring Liferay Cache Performance, Dynamic Data Lists II, JRebel, BugSquad, Dynamic Data Lists I, Liferay Projects, France Symposium Recap, Remote Staging/HTTPS, Browser History Support, Liferay Dream Day Barcelona, Social Applications, ANTLR Creole Parser, Trademark Policy, Jabber Integration, Accessible Websites with Liferay.  Whew, that's a lot.
• Wiki Updates: Integrating YouTube, Translation Team, Liferay IDE, JSON Web Services, Workflow Definition, Meetups Portlet, CMS Template, JSON Serialization, SMTP Setup, Solr Integration, Javadoc Guidelines, Custom Queries, Comet Integration, OracleXE, LDAP Support with OpenDJ, Liferay Editorial Guidelines, JBoss/Tomcat/Liferay Clustering, Timezones, Backup and Restore, Service Builder, Contributing

Whew, I have learned my lesson about waiting too long to post roundups.  Hope everyone is having a safe and enjoyable summer (in the northern hemisphere) or winter (down undah), see you all soon in LA at the West Coast Symposium!