The Liferay Developer Network: A New Home for Developers

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 from our user community for years, we knew that the way we currently publish our documentation had some problems:

  1. Many times, people would search either on liferay.com or the search engine of their choice, for a topic they needed to know about. Often, the search results would direct them to an article in Liferay's Wiki. The Wiki over the years has become a place where well-intentioned Liferay employees and community members have placed articles describing how to use various features of Liferay. Because the Wiki has been on the site for so long, Google tends to rank its articles pretty high. Even though I've been shouting from the highest turrets that the Wiki is not Liferay's documentation, Google's indexing bot doesn't have ears.

    Unfortunately, however, the Wiki is also where user documentation goes to die. Articles are written and then abandoned by their authors. They then become out of date and actually do more harm than good, by sending people who read them down rabbit trails that were meant for older versions of Liferay. For this reason, we are retiring the Liferay Wiki. In its place, we've created Liferaypedia, a new Wiki for defining Liferay, development, and open source terms.

  2. We've also heard feedback that our current documentation pages are hard to navigate. There's a reason for this: they're just HTML versions of documentation that's organized as books. We've now changed that. The Liferay Developer Network is divided into four sections:
    • Discover: The contents of Liferay's user-oriented documentation have been re-imagined for this section. Front and center is the documentation for Liferay Portal. Using a new interface, it's much easier to find the documentation you're looking for. The Social Office section contains our Social Office documentation. The Deployment section is for Liferay systems administrators everywhere: it contains documentation for installing and configuring Liferay, including clustering.

    • Develop: This is the section for developers. When we designed it, we asked ourselves, Who is our audience, and how will they want to learn about Liferay?. What we learned was that we have a variety of readers: some want to learn in a step-by-step fashion, and some already have a project and want a quick answer to a question. To serve everybody, we created learning paths for developers new to Liferay who want to start from scratch, and we created tutorials for developers in the midst of a project who want to learn something quickly. And, of course, we have our reference documentation so you can look up APIs, tag libraries, DTDs, faces docs, and properties docs.

    • Distribute: Everything developers need to know about distributing their applications on Liferay Marketplace is right here. You can learn all about the benefits of Marketplace, how to get started, view the Marketplace User Guide, and more.

    • Participate: This is the new home for Liferay's community. As the months go by, we'll be migrating more and more of our community pages here. Currently, it contains information on how to contribute to Liferay, the aforementioned Liferaypedia, the feature ideas page, and the feedback forums.

  3. Want to contribute to the documentation like you maybe once did with the Wiki? We haven't left you out. In fact, we welcome contributions to our documentation. And here's the real kicker: because we have a team of people reviewing and updating our documentation, you can do the same thing you did with the Wiki. Submit it and forget about it. We'll take care of keeping the documentation you submit up to date with all the changes that happen to Liferay in the future. You won't have to worry or feel guilty about your submitted documentation again! Instead, you can feel good knowing that you made an important contribution to Liferay, because contributions help our community. There are three ways in which you can contribute:
    • Editing existing documentation. Every piece of documentation on the site contains an Edit with Github button. This lets you go to our documentation repository and use Github's tools to edit documentation right in your browser. When you're finished, you can send a pull request to the liferay-docs repository, and we'll review your updates and push them into the site.

    • Creating new documentation. Every section of the Liferay Developer Network has a corresponding folder in our repository. In that folder is another folder called new-articles. If you have documentation for a feature we don't currently cover, you can submit it right into this folder. You don't have to know where it goes in the rest of our docs or anything like that. We even have a shell script (Mac, Linux) and a batch file (Windows) that lets you preview your Markdown in HTML before you submit it. Submit it to the liferay-docs repository.

    • Contributing to Liferaypedia. We still have a Wiki, but it's for defining Liferay and open source terms. Currently, it's pretty bare, and we need to fill it out. We could use definitions for all kinds of terms that are germane to Liferay, like CMIS and SAML, as well as Liferay concepts like Theme Display and Service Builder.

In closing, I just want to say that we've designed this site for our community of users and developers. All design decisions were made based on feedback from our community. We know we're not perfect, however, and we may not have captured everything you've been telling us over the years. For that reason, and because we're in beta and can still change things, there's a feedback link at the bottom of every page. We welcome your feedback. Don't know where to start? How about starting with our learning paths. This is a brand new effort we're making, the learning paths aren't complete yet, and we want to make sure we're getting it right. Try reading the first learning path and let us know what you think. Will it help beginners get started with Liferay?

Or maybe you're more interested in mobile development on Liferay. We have a whole set of mobile tutorials that you could read and let us know if they're hitting the mark on Liferay mobile development.

Thanks for reading this long post, and thanks for all the great feedback we've heard on our documentation over the years. We hope that the new Liferay Developer Network serves you well as we continue to build it.

Blogs
Looks very impressive and quite interesting.
Things other than liferaypedia looks very promising to me.

However as perhaps mentioned also liferaypedia should be more mature than just wiki. Maybe it should be must to add some tags or categories to every wiki page to mention which liferay version this is targeted to etc.

And great work, much thanks to the team emoticon
Hi Gaurav,

The idea for Liferaypedia is that it will be an encyclopedia of Liferay-related terms (just like Wikipedia but focused on Liferay). Because of that, all pages should not be specific to any Liferay version (although in the content it can refer to them). Tutorials, which will be specific to liferay versions will be published in the Developer > Tutorials section.
I love it. Very promising. Very professional! Thanks for having created this.
(I confirm that old wiki is leading to wrong / deprecated information)

What would be great to add to the developer network is a section about "samples":
- web content structure and templates: slideshow, video, youtube, etc.
- application templates
- velocity snippets
- etc.