Liferay 7 Milestone 3 - Happy Year-End Hacking

It’s the end of the year season and most programmers take a few days of to spend time with family and/or friends and of course check out some new technologies. While we know there are many exciting new techs to choose from, we wanted you to have at least one more option to choose from by making available a new and shiny milestone of Liferay 7. This is a great opportunity to see the latest developments that are getting so many people excited after our symposiums and DevCon.

 

This milestone includes 160+ stories finished since M2 was released, but the one that probably shines the brighter is the out of the box Geolocation support. As Juan Fernández mentioned in his blog, this milestone already contains the capability to geolocate web content, documents & media and dynamic data lists. The location can be setup to be entered manually by the user (entering an address) or automatically using the HTML5 geolocation feature.

 

Introducing the location in a web content

This becomes a really cool feature as soon as you start displaying a list of assets in a map, something that you can also do out of the box by picking the mapping template of Asset Publisher:

Displaying geolocated assets in a Map with Asset Publisher

And in case you were wondering, you are not tied to Google Maps. You can also use OpenStreetMaps or add any other maps provider. If you haven’t done so yet, go ahead and read Juan Fernandez’s blog about the new geolocation support. This capability will be added to other content types later including your custom ones, through Custom Fields, so take a look at it now and provide your feedback, since you will get a lot of benefit from it :)

 

The second highlight of the release is how the process to modularize more and more parts of the core using our OSGi-based infrastructure is gaining a lot of speed. As proof of that here is an screenshot of the directories that hold the extracted out modules so far (the collapsed dirs just contain one module inside with the same name and -web as a suffix):

 

Finally here are some other smaller improvements that I considered worth of mentioning:

  • Web Content types have been converted to a categories vocabulary (with an automatic upgrade process for those previously using Web Content types).

  • Added back the ability to download Structured Web Content as an XML from the Web Content administration UI.

  • Improvements in the default configuration: Message Boards notifications will include the name of the poster, blog lists will use abstracts instead of full content.

  • Added support for “Likes” for any asset type in addition to the two existing rating systems: stars and thumbs up/down

  • Alloy Editor which debuted in Milestone 2 has also received improvements, specially based on the feedback in the blog entry and during Liferay DevCon 2014. In particular two new buttons were added to the editor: for writing code and for quotes. Additionally some issues were fixed, such as: AE-75. Work has also started to implement larger improvements such as a code editor.

  • Many improvements to the APIs of DynamicDataMapping (DDM) are also included in this release, specially increasing the features exposed through remote APIs.

 

That’s it, if you are eager to check it out, just go to the downloads page for Milestone 3 at sourceforge. I hope you enjoy it and please send us all of your feedback :)

 

Happy Season to everybody!

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Hi Jeorge ,

Would like try hands on upgrade process . Is it possible to upgrade any previous version to Liferay 7 with M3 ? If yes then is there any change in upgrade process ?

Thank you,
Jitendra
Hi Jitendra,

Yes, it's possible, although it's been barely tested so many things might go wrong. We are actually working right now in quite a few improvements to the process right now to make it much better once Liferay 7 final is released so you might prefer to wait in order to start testing. Once the improvements are done we will be actively looking for beta testers emoticon
Hi Jorge,

I am going to use M3 in production system. I already have experience using trunk versions in production emoticon it was v.5 when I needed new Asset Manager.

Now, I need Bootstrap 3.

By looking into past: 10 months between 6.2.0-M4 (2013-02-20) and 6.2.0-GA1 (2013-12-12).

Will it be easy to upgrade database in the future? I always feel something gets broken... for instance, out-of-the-box installation of Liferay 7 M3 has broken article editor buttons, I suspect because of encoding issues with default Hypersonic. No any problems with MySQL + UTF8.

I am also considering jumping to trunk versions and/or cherry picks in case if I need specific feature...

Another comment: I noticed M3 release, but GitHub had this tag only after some delay... Thanks!
Wow, M3 in production! That's being adventurous emoticon

There will be ways to upgrade the database because we also have internal systems running M3 that rely on them. However, they may not always run as smoothly as you would expect from a final release and as result it might require you to research db changes and apply some manually. But if you are running a milestone in production I'm pretty sure that won't be an issue emoticon

Regarding using master it's getting more stable over time, but if you decide to do it, make sure to do enough testing before doing it. Not breaking through advice, but still necessary. Have fun!
Hi Fuad,

please be aware of any security attack attempts. We plan to do full security audits before releasing stable versions.

Please see for example: http://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/35652/

Thank you.