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This year, the Knowledge Management team at Liferay set out not only to document Liferay 7/DXP, but to document it well. To do this, we identified several improvements we wanted to make: We wanted to connect powerfully with users and customers. To do this, we made a significant effort toward documenting the right things, the things people needed the most to learn about. We...

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At Liferay's North American Symposium, I announced the immediate availability of a new website we've developed specifically for those who use Liferay and write code on its platform. We call this site the Liferay Developer Network. This site is the new home for Liferay's documentation and, by the time it gets out of beta, Liferay's community pages. After receiving good feedback...

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I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of the print edition of Using Liferay Portal 6.1! For those of you on your toes (and you know who you are), it's actually been available since Friday, but who reads a blog entry that is published on Friday afternoon? It's a big book. We're getting close to 700 pages now in print, and that does not include the properties...

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One of the benefits of moving our documentation out of LibreOffice and into Markdown is that Markdown converts to many publishable formats. We're already converting it into Liferay web content for display on the web site. I had always planned to publish also in PDF and print format, and up until recently, I intended to use the open source DTP program Scribus to do so. Those of you who...

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Since we haven't been announcing it much, you're probably unaware that we've recently started making weekly updates to the Liferay documentation. This is one of the reasons we haven't published the PDF or the book yet, though now we're getting much closer to doing just that. But I want to use this space to point out what's been updated recently, so you can see all the great new...

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One of the things we've been working on over the past few months is a complete reorganization of Using Liferay Portal, the documentation for our flagship product, Liferay Portal. For the 6.1 release cycle, we decided to rename the book (it used to be called the Liferay Portal Administrator's Guide) so that it would better reflect its content. For several releases, the "Admin Guide"...

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Writing is something I've been doing for a long time. I mean, a long time--since I was something like 12 years old. To give you a piece of perspective on this (without giving away my age), I was 12 years old in the 1980s. Since then, a lot of things have changed with regard to writing: word usage (I still by default write *worshipped* and *kidnapped*), the process (mindmapping...

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I've learned a lot while writing Liferay in Action. I'm going through my final edits now before the book goes through its production cycle, tightening up the prose and making sure everything is as clear as I can make it. Once of the things I've had a lot of fun doing is the crutch. What is a crutch? It's a technique whereby you introduce a concept with an anecdote, a story, or an...

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The Liferay in Action MEAP was updated today and now includes all the chapters that will be a part of the book. I still have some editing to do, but we're getting pretty close now. From the Manning announcement:    What's new: Chapter 1, "Liferay is a different portal," has been revised. Chapter 2, "Appray: Development at...

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Well, we're marching right along on our way to completion. Manning has just updated the Liferay in Action MEAP with the next-to-last chapter, on Ext plugins. With this chapter, you learn all about Ext plugins, what they're for, and how you can use them. You also learn about the core of Liferay: what it's composed of and how it's architected. Along with this,...

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The Liferay in Action MEAP update came out on Christmas Eve, so I wanted to make sure that I let everyone knew about it in case you, like me, have been offline for the past few days. So Merry Christmas from me, Liferay and Manning: you get a whopping big chapter which covers a lot of ground:    - Liferay's asset system, which undergirds a lot of other...

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This has been a long time coming, and could not have been done without the help of a whole team of people, but we have finally done a redesign of the documentation pages on this site. Our previous docs page was, I'll admit, confusing. In fact, we've heard several times that people thought the only documentation we had is in our wiki, and that is far from the truth. The wiki is great,...

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Ever since I first started working for Liferay, I had always planned to release two books: the Liferay Portal Administrator's Guide, and the Liferay Portal Developer's Guide. They were designed to be companion books: one (the Administrator's Guide) would help users get started with Liferay by showing how to install, configure, and use Liferay out of the box. The other (the...

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With great (relief? fanfare?) enthusiasm, I am happy to announce the availability of the Liferay Portal Administrator's Guide, Third Edition. Now coming in at a more hefty 313 pages, this is the best Admin Guide that we have ever released. It's been updated to cover Liferay 5.2.x, which means coverage of the Liferay Control Panel. It also includes a new chapter on Liferay's...

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From the pen of my daughter (age three):  

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I am pleased to announce the availability of the Liferay Administrator's Guide, Second Edition. The Guide has now been exhaustively gone through and updated to support Liferay 5.1 (and below). But there's more than that: a new chapter on Portal Administration has been added which covers how to design a site using Liferay and how to use Liferay's administrative portlets. Beyond the...

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Some people might be wondering why I've been so scarce around here. The reason for this is that I and my team have been heads-down working on a couple of brand new training courses that we will soon be offering. We've just put the finishing touches on both courses, and I am excited about what's in store. First up is the new Portal Administration course. This is a two-day introductory...

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Liferay is a big application, made up of thousands of files. That's not the kind of typical, everyday application that your system is used to dealing with. Everywhere I've worked (including Liferay), I've made a point of advocating to the IT department that a developer needs both a different kind of machine and a different kind of configuration than the regular worker. Thankfully,...

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Here's a good story for a Friday: I'm running around today opening windows because it's hot, but not so hot as to turn on the air conditioner. I'm a little frustrated trying to get something to work, and so I want to get back to it. Because of this, I'm racing around the house trying to get the windows open as fast as possible. Last room to enter is my three year-old daughter's room,...

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Just wanted to let you know that the Quickstart Guide (upon which the below video is based) is now available! You can grab it at the Community landing page: http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/community. It's a lot easier to follow the doc than the video. :-)

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A few weeks ago our CEO proposed a challenge to me: create a document that shows how to create an Intranet in Liferay in 10 minutes. Here's a demonstration video: Oh, and the document will be available at the Liferay booth at JavaOne.

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Well, it's a little late and yes, it's a little behind, but the first edition of the Liferay Administrator's Guide has hit the presses! Covering Liferay Portal 4.3, it goes over everything from installing Liferay to an application server to integrating it with other services, such as chat and workflow. There's a complete description in the blurb on the back of the book. Writing a...

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Despite years of resistance, I am now a Kubuntu user. It's taken a lot to get me here, but if you're interested, hang on to your hat. I've been using Linux for many years as my primary operating system at home. I started off in 1994 (!) with a copy of Slackware that came with a book and several CDs of software. I managed to configure my 486DX/33 system to triple boot DOS, OS/2, and...

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First of all, a belated Happy New Year! This is my first blog post in the new year (and in the new theme), and I'm excited about what I have to report. Last night I finally finished the first draft of the Liferay Administrator's Guide. It's a bit pared down from the outline that's published out on the wiki, but that was done in order to get the book out as quickly as possible. For the...

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Quietly and without much fanfare, we have released the first document in our new Liferay Documentation Project. This is because it's a rather small document, but it fills a need to have some instructions for using our Plugins SDK available. Since the Plugins SDK is now the preferred method for creating portlets and themes, not having it documented was sort of a glaring omission. This...

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This is a list of things I learned at the Liferay retreat. You should not give Nerf guns to developers with pent up energy from sitting around coding all the time.  Pandemonium will ensue. Many Liferay-ers are multi-talented. We have singers, guitarists, dancers (sort of), people who are good at sports, and, um, monkeys. There is debate over whether you need to be...

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Okay, I couldn't resist posting this. We had our first snow in this area today (Southern New Jersey, not far from Philadelphia, PA), and it was the triple whammy of: Christmas coming Snow Getting ready to attend the Liferay retreat that caused my two and a half year-old daughter to begin combining the three concepts in song. Though I didn't get it on video, she...

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I've been meaning all month to get my driver's license renewed. Here in New Jersey, this is the kind of thing many people have been trained to dread. Long wait times and surly people behind the counter were the norm for so long that I think the situation even became known across the country. I wanted to get this done early in the month so that I wouldn't get stuck with all the...

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What's this? Two blog posts within five minutes? Yes, well, I thought this would be appropriate as we are about to celebrate Thanksgiving here in the United States. I've had this hanging on my wall for years. I originally got it from a humor mailing list years ago (2000, I think). --- TO BE THANKFUL FOR:The mess to clean after a party because I have been surrounded by friends.The...

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Touch typists (like me) don't like to take their hands off the home row of the keyboard if they can at all help it. If I'm in the middle of doing something requiring intense concentration (such as writing or coding), I want distractions kept to a minimum. One of the most annoying things about the PC keyboard layout is that they put the Control key way down underneath the shift key on...

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One of the goals I set for myself with regard to the Liferay documentation was to show people how to set up Liferay for development (either core, extension or plugins) in both of the leading open source IDEs: Eclipse and Netbeans. I have been using Eclipse for many years,and so I know my way around that IDE pretty well. Plus that environment has been pretty much covered in the...

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A couple of days ago I was humming along working happily when suddenly, doink! The power went out. It was a beautiful bright sunny day, and so I might not have noticed right away except that my new printer (see a couple of posts down) clicked and when I looked over at it, I saw that the little blue power light was out. When I looked back at my machine, my screen had dimmed. I was on...

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One of the topics I've seen over and over on the forums is confusion over the configuration of Hot Deploy in Liferay. It can be complicated, and the default configuration is not a valid one if you are not using Tomcat as your container, so people frequently run into problems with it. Since I have just finished a section in the official docs about this topic, I thought it would be good...

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One of the things I was looking forward to when starting with Liferay was the opportunity to work at home full time. I've worked at home in the past, but it was always on an ad-hoc basis, on days when somebody had a doctor's appointment, the car needed servicing, etc. I'd go do whatever the errand was and then work at home for the remainder of the day so I wouldn't have to take a day...

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I recently got myself a nice new mono laser printer with duplexing capabilities. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a good deal on a simple mono laser printer that has duplexing built in? You would think at this point that with all the effort going into selling color laser printers, the market in mono laser printers could be kept alive better if all the manufacturers would...

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While it's nice to blog about some of the tools I use (see the below posts on VirtualBox and the Lomboz plugin for Eclipse for more info), I figured I should probably mention some of the stuff I'm working on for Liferay. Though I'd like to think I was brought in because of my 1337 5k1||z, the fact of the matter is that I have only one ingredient that separates me from others (and it...

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My operating system of choice happens to be Mandriva Linux. Currently, I am running the Mandriva Linux 2008 Power Pack release. I have been running Mandriva since the dawn of time in Linux parlance: since it was called Mandrake and was a derivitive of Redhat. Since I joined Liferay, I have found that I often need Windows in order to test and debug support tickets. I have a new machine...

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I've used the Lomboz plugin now to create several portlet projects for Liferay, and it's worked out very well. For those who don't know what the Lomboz plugin is, it's got a rich history. It used to be pretty much the only open source way of creating Java Enterprise (then J2EE) projects in Eclipse, as it predated the Web Tools Project. Now it works with the Web Tools Project, providing...

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Well, that's better. I've now replaced the picture. It seemed appropriate: I took a vacation day during my last week with my old employer in order to take my daughter to the Adventure Aquarium here in New Jersey. It just so happened that I was wearing my Liferay T-Shirt at the time, in great anticipation of starting my new job.   That picture is the result of many attempts...

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Wow, horror of horrors, I got my blog page up!   I'm a fairly new Liferay employee, and it looks like the first thing I need to do is replace my image. Currently, it's the mug shot my old employer took for my ID card. :-)    Well, this first entry is just a test anyway. Testing....1..2..3..testing!