Live Blogging from the 2008 Liferay Meetup

For the benefit of everyone who may not be able to attend the Liferay Meetup today, I'll be trying to update this blog post. Any noteable information, oustanding events, questions, I'll try and update this blog throughout the day. Hope you enjoy it! If If anyone has any questions go ahead and leave them in the comments and I'll try and answer them.

9:10am - Keynote by Brian Chan and Bryan Cheung

The Brian's went over the some of the latest happenings in Liferay. Growth in the portal and its user base, new partners (Sun, Intalio, Pentaho, Icefaces), vision for the future, were some of the topics covered.

*Update 10:52am*
Attending Ray Auge's CMS Brainstorming session.
There's maybe 24 people here and Ray is currently presenting information on the three latest features for CMS: Remote Publishing, Scheduled Publishing, and Improved Workflow. Ray is currently demo'ing some of the latest features of Remote Publishing and how to schedule publishing over a period of time.

Goals for the future: improving the workflow associated with publishing Journal content.

Questions: Problems with blogs, no blogging files, no way to publish to the blog portlets. Questions about navigation in the Wiki Portlet.

Bottom Line: An informative session showcasing some of the latest features in Liferay CMS.

*Update 11:31am* - Presentation by Sun - Building Scalable Web Portals with Liferay and Sun
Contributions that Sun has made to the Liferay Community
OpenPortal projects have been integrated into Liferay
-Portlet Container - JSR-286 Implementation
-Container API & Implementation
-Webservices for Remote Portlets (WRSP) 2.0 implementation
-Simple API for Workflow
-Liferay Journal implementation now uses the Mirage (JSR 170)

Improved Liferay Bundles with Glassfish
Open SSO authentication mechanism for Liferay
Netbeans Plugins for Liferay
Working with Liferay on a continuous integration environment for testing. (Hudson)

What is currently being worked on:
Notification widget
Feature to allow users to recommend portlets to friends
Presence infrastructure service
High Availability and Scalability document
Enhancing Message Boards
FAQ Builder Portlet

Why is Sun participating in Liferay?
Liferay is the most mature and vibrant open source portal community
Will help them ultimately in adoption of Sun open source enterprise solutions.

Bottom Line on this session: Lots of interesting information about collaboration between Sun and Liferay.

Lunch! Liferay provided a great lunch for everyone present: Chicken, salsa, beans, rice, tortillas.

*Updated* 3:01pm
UI Development with Nate Cavanaugh
We've moved from one room to the upper loft area of the church because it has become quite warm here in southern California. Thank goodness for air conditioning!

Everyone benefits from having a good UI.
Portals are the next generation of Web OS. Desiging a functional UI for a multicultural world continues to be a challenge. Developing a UI requires taking bandwith, screensize, sharing the DOM, CSS, beyond thinking about just cpu and memory.
Patterns in development are keys to development:
Fundamentals in development patterns: Logical, Maintainable, repeatable.
Form fields: Using a bolded label bolded above the text field is 60% faster than any other cases.

Bottom line: Witty, humorous, and informative on principles of UI design. And a great preview of things to come in the future!

[Josh Asbury]

Thanks for this JR. I did the same at http://josh.hinutech.com Most of it is mostly notes for myself, but folks might be able to glean some information out of it.

[Jorge Ferrer]

Thanks JR

BTW, I'm interested in the comments about wiki navigation, since I have some ideas about this for the near future. Do you remember what people said?