This wiki does not contain official documentation and is currently deprecated and read only. Please try reading the documentation on the Liferay Developer Network, the new site dedicated to Liferay documentation. DISCOVER Build your web site, collaborate with your colleagues, manage your content, and more. DEVELOP Build applications that run inside Liferay, extend the features provided out of the box with Liferay's APIs. DISTRIBUTE Let the world know about your app by publishing it in Liferay's marketplace. PARTICIPATE Become a part of Liferay's community, meet other Liferay users, and get involved in the open source project. Liferay Portal 6.2 Community Beta Program
Introduction and Goals #
Liferay relies on its open source community to help validate Liferay releases before they are generally available, to maximize quality before the release. Liferay follows an iterative software release cycle, with interim development builds (called Milestones), followed by a Beta period in which feature-complete builds are produced, and then finally one or more Release Candidate builds, one of which becomes the final release (called the first "GA" release).
For 6.2, the goal of this Liferay Community Beta Program is to validate the Beta-quality releases of Liferay, and ensure that it meets the needs of its community of enthusiasts, users, partners, customers, and developers. Feedback will be taken at high priority to ensure that issues discovered by our community program are considered and acted upon before the release.
Ideas for new features are always encouraged (and should be filed via the Ideas board), but keep in mind that to maintain high quality and the ability to release a solid product, large-scale changes and new features will likely have to wait until after the 6.2 release. Most important now is to look at the existing feature set and see if there are glaring bugs, major incompatibilities or other usability issues that should be considered to be fixed prior to GA.
Getting Involved #
The 6.2 Beta Program is free and is open to the entire community! To become a member of the 6.2 Beta Program, simply sign up and let us know which areas (tracks) in which you are interested in participating, and you will be add to the team and given specific instructions for each track you are interested.
We will also be giving small gifts to those that participate, to proudly show that you were involved in the 6.2 release! Also, for anyone that has contributed in the past, please add your name to the Community Contributor Hall of Fame!
Timeline #
- Sign-up Period: August 5-12
- Beta Testing Begins: August 12
- Last day to file issues: September 27
Of course, you can file bugs after the cutoff date, but bugs coming in after this date may not get triaged or dealt with before the release.
Downloads #
The Beta Builds that the Community Beta program will use can be found below. You may need more than one of these to complete your testing!
- Tomcat Bundle
- GlassFish Bundle
- Source Code Bundle
- Source Code Repository
- Javadoc and other reference documentation
- Other files (Includes other app server builds like JOnAS or Resin, standalone WAR files, dependency JARs, etc)
Beta Program Tracks #
To better organize our efforts and ensure that we have good coverage of this release, we have broken the best testing into separate tracks.
| Track | Name | Description | QA Lead | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Track 1 | Systems Testing | Beta test Liferay in your system environment, paying particular attention to issues around Operating System, App Server, Database, Browser, JDK/JRE. | TBD | |
| Track 2 | New Features and Functionality Testing | Test drive Liferay's new features before they are available. | TBD | |
| Track 3 | Integration and Compatibility Testing | Ensure your apps and 3rd-party integrations are ready to go with the new release. | TBD | |
| Track 4 | Upgrade Testing | Help improve the quality of Liferay Portal by testing the upgrade path from your current Liferay version. | TBD |
Each track will have a suggested set of activities/features/tasks that you will be expected to consider, for each track you are participating in. Each track will also have one or more Liferay QA Engineers assigned to help guide participants, file issues, and see them through to resolution.
New Feature Details #
- Mobile (Site Preview, Responsive Themes, Device Recognition)
- UI & UX (Bootstrap, Dockbar, Accessibility, other improvements)
- WCM (Recycle Bin, ADT, Page Mgmt, WCM Admin, authoring improvements)
- Staging (Validation, Offline Support)
- Site Management (Membership, Hierarchical sites, cross-site sharing)
- Document Management (Drag/Drop, Subscriptions, I18N of Doc Types)
- Collaboration (Blogs, Wiki improvements)
- Calendar (New UI, Resource scheduling, Multiple calendars)
- Administration (Control Panel, Permission management)
- Platform (OSGi, OAuth, Portlet Sandboxing, PACL, Web Services)
- Developer (Liferay IDE, APIs, Themes)
- Micellaneous (Search improvements, Batch content creation, 3rd party integrations)
The above are high-level feature areas of Liferay. If you want to know specifically (down to the granularity of each work ticket), check out the 6.2 Stories by Feature area. This is a hierarchical listing of each item representing change that went into the 6.2 beta release.
Known issues and limitations #
As the beta program progresses, major issues that participants should be aware of will be listed here (it is not an exhaustive list of all bugs found in Beta - for that, check out Beta Bug list).
Known beta issues:
- The Welcome Page that was present in the earlier Milestones has been removed in the Beta-1 build, but there are plans to bring it back.
