Community Roundup

"Life would be so much easier if we only had the source code." - Author Unknown

Here we go again.  Once again I have failed to live up to my promises of a once-a-month roundup, and for that I apologize! It's been a very busy and exciting 6 weeks in our community, so I am here to give you a digest of the latest coolness that is the Liferay Community.  So please keep arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times, and sit back and enjoy the ride.  Let's do this thing!

  • I was fortunate enough to attend two of Liferay's symposiums last month, the Liferay Europe Symposium in Frankfurt, and the Liferay Spain Symposium in Madrid.  Met many awesome community members, attended a bunch of interesting sessions and activities, and generally had a great time learning from our European community contingent.  Slides from Europe and Slides from Spain are now available!
  • If you are near Rome this week, the final symposium of 2011 is taking place this Friday (November 18).  If you have a chance to attend the Liferay Italy Symposium, you will be pleasantly surprised at the highest ever quality content to date. 
  • We are coming up on the close of the Liferay 6.1 chapter in the epic book of Liferay.  On November 14 Liferay released its Beta-4 build, and it is now downloadable, but if you are participating in Community BugSquad, of course you have already reviewed the sneak-peek 6.1 builds, and several of your feedbacks/suggestions/fixes/improvements have already been incorporated, with more to come!  
  • You may have noticed a new celebrity blogger on liferay.com: Jan Gregor from Mimacom is kicking off the first of many Liferay Community Projects.  This project is implementing a Liferay/JRebel plugin to facilitate easy realtime, no-restart-needed deployment of apps on LIferay.  More notable though is that we at Liferay are going to elevate these kinds of community-driven "incubation" projects to a higher level of visibility on liferay.org, providing more collaboration tools (like user groups) and project status.  If you are interested in starting a new project (or housing an existing project) on liferay.org, contact community@liferay.com
  • Olaf has published several more Radio Liferay releases, the latest of which features several of our high profile community members discussing their contributions and thoughts on our community. Check out the Radio Liferay feed page for more details and links to the streams. Recent Episodes: [9] [8] [7] [6] [5] and [4]
  • Liferay's User Groups continue to expand, with new groups beginning in Portland, Portugal, Norway, and others.  Visit the User Groups page to see all the recent activity.
  • Speaking of User Groups, the Spain User Group had a recent LSUG Meeting in Seville and it was a very successful event (15 attendees).  You can read the minutes and if interested, there are upcoming meetings in Marid, Sevilla, Barcelona, and Alicante.
  • Liferay's Community Leadership Team held its quarterly meetup last month, with several interesting discussions regarding what's buzzing in the community.  Check out the meeting minutes and follow the action on the thread if interested!
  • Notable industry blogger Dana Blankenhorn has an interesting take on Liferay's business model and mission.  Dana gave a rousing talk about the history of open source at WCS, and has written several great articles on open source in general.
  • Bradley's Tips!  This is a great collection of tidbits of useful information. Recently I've seen a lot of these kinds of things coming up (like Ray's gists), I think we need a centralized place into which these are placed, for easy access and searching!  *adds idea to queue*
  • Liferay IDE 1.4 has been released, with support of the upcoming Liferay 6.1, and Tomcat 7, as well as a few other goodies. Check out Greg's blog for details.
  • Random website running Liferay: AXA IM Corporate Website!
  • Remember that "50 Liferay Interview Questions" post from a while back?  Well, now you have the answers!
  • As you look back on the Liferay Community, you can see many innovative contributions and outstanding achievements.  You can also see a large ball of abused and ignored bug reports!  The Liferay Community has deputized a team of experts to help with this: Community Verifiers!  And we need your help!  If you are interested, leave comments below!
  • Wasim shows us how to install Liferay on eApps cloud hosting.  Yet another example of Liferay's cloud-friendliness.  
  • If you missed Oracle OpenWorld 2011, Liferay demonstrated the new features of Liferay 6.1, and was mentioned as one of 12 "hot products to see".  Cool! Well.. Hot!
  • We continue to see Open Source displacing proprietary stacks worldwide.  TechRepublic Live in Louisville mentioned Liferay as one of those displacing forces.
  • Speaking of the spread of Open Source, Gartner's 2011 Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals has placed Liferay in the Leader's Quadrant for the second year.  The only open source leader!  More coverage from CMS Report.
  • Mika has posted an excellent set of slides describing Liferay's SAML 2.0 support.  
  • Integrating Liferay with JOSSO (an open source SSO solution) has never been easier with Liferay 6.1.  Check out Gianluca's blog for details.
  • Liferay coverage from PyCON.  A Python conference.  Talking about Java portals?  Nice!
  • We in the Liferay Community are working on a new structured program to more easily get new users over the initial learning hill of Liferay, and provide valuable educational content to all of our community, regardless of expertise level. We need your input to proceed.  How should we structure such a program?  Leave your comments in the thread and learn by teaching!
  • Several people have been playing with Liferay and Jelastic (yet another cloud service).  Some discussion has taken place on the forums, and Marina has taken the time to write down details of this deployment.  Have fun with this one.
  • A thought-provoking examination of portals, and when they make sense.  For this author, it did not, but it provides some interesting guidance about when it does.
  • Activa wrote up a nice piece on the 2011 Spain Symposium.  Activa has been very active in our community and is a valuable community parter for Liferay! 
  • Finally!  Some handy scripts that can be cut/pasted into Liferay's Control Panel scripting console.  Terry provides a nice way to clean up user.  Be careful, there's no going back :)
  • No idea who created this or why, but it sounds fantastic :)
  • I really like Liferay's support for Dynamic Data Lists.  It's been a long time coming and how it's here.  Check out Arvind's description of it, and try it out in the latest beta!
  • Often the bane of developers, writing tests is a crucial part of ensuring quality in your projects.  With Liferay, it's really easy to write selenium tests (we at Liferay use this extensively, along with Jenkins).  Steffen shows how to do it.
  • Your 15 minutes are here.  15 minutes to Liferay on Cloudbees!

Recent Blog Posts: Radio Liferay Episodes [9] [8] [7] [6] [5] [4], WYSIWYG Editors, Philosophy of Writing, Custom Tools for Script Engine, Monitoring through firewalls, Embedding Portlets in Themes, Community Excellence, Spring and OSGi, Liferay @ Gartner ITExpo, Git Tips from Igor, Community Verifier, Fireworks, and finally Ehcache Configuration.

Recent Wiki Updates: CMIS and Alfresco 4.0, Custom Fields, Pagination, Development Style, Mail Integration, SOAP Web Services, Application Adapters (always wondered what those were!), Translation Team, AlloyUI Forms, Faceted Search, Slimming Liferay, Google Analytics

That's all I have for now.  I will do a Holiday Edition next month, with some goodies for all.  Enjoy your day!

 

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Hi James, Thanks for sharing. James I always do follow the community roundups and try not to miss one. Is it possible to have a subscribe option against user for his asset types. Like i want to get notified whenever you post new blog entry. Is it possible to have that? It would be really useful to get the notification as soon as you post a new blog entry
@sandeep - Thanks for following my posts! Actually, we may have a solution upcoming very soon - we are doing a feed of Olaf's Radio Liferay posts, so we could also do one for roundups... so stay tuned emoticon

@puj - thanks!

@wasim - no problem, glad you like!
BTW sandeep, you can always subscribe via RSS to all blogs by going to blogs.liferay.com and clicking on the "RSS" link at the bottom!