Community Roundup

Hello, wonderful World of Liferay! It's (way past) time for another Community Roundup! This is an ongoing (but sadly sporadic) series of blog posts that summarize the latest news from around our community. As your community manager, I'm very humbled and thankful for all of you who take the time to participate or give back to our community in some way. It would be a sad and lonely place without you, so I will try and highlight relevant news and activities from around the community.

First I'd like to recognize our awesome Top Contributors from the last half of 2013. These women and men have gone above and beyond the call of community in many ways, and deserve a hearty thanks for their contribution. Andrew, Jan, Dhrituka, Nagul Meera, Denis, and Pier exemplify what our community is all about by spending their time and resources helping others. Thank you to them and to all that selflessly contribute to our little corner of the world! Now, on with the links!

  • This year, we're renewing our focus and efforts on the Liferay Developer experience. There are many different areas we can improve, and here are a few we've identified that we're working on for you:
    • Getting started / onboarding - Liferay has historically had a steep learning curve. Aside from ongoing efforts to improve documentation, usability, and quality of the platform, we're also trying to add content for new and existing developers to quickly get up to speed on Liferay and related technology.
    • Developer Network - a new site dedicated to developers, to put the resources you need only a few clicks away, organized to not only for participation (e.g. blogs and forums), but with easy to follow guides, samples, and content geared toward development with Liferay.
    • Forum improvements, such as additional view options (best answer first), categorization of developer topics, badging/achievements, and more ways to find relevant and timely posts besides "Recent Posts" (feel free to add comments in this thread!).
    • More interactive/live tech sessions - We've done these sporadically over the years, and I'd like to make it a regular (i.e. scheduled) series with focused topics in each session. No "Intro to Liferay" here!
    • Much of it is still in progress, but hopefully in the next few months you'll start to see more content dedicated to our community developers, and we can together make it a fun and exciting place to be :)
  • As a community grows, it becomes more important to document the nature of the community and expectations between its members. This gives the community a greater sense of identity, direction, and purpose, and helps new members understand what the community is all about and what they can expect from it when considering joining. To that end, our leadership team has created a Community Ethos for this purpose, documenting who we are and what we collectively stand for.
  • Last year, Bitergia worked with Liferay to better understand our project and the trends in the development of Liferay in our community. It's an interesting read on how we're doing, and we're using much of this data to drive community initiatives in the coming year.
  • Peter Mesotten has written up a nice piece on Liferay 6.2 "Under the hood". Also, I wish Liferay had a Marketing "machine"!
  • Although we get a ton of community traffic on the liferay.com forums, it is not the only place where one can get some awesome Liferay action. Check out the Liferay leaders on stackoverflow.com, who tirelessly help our community wherever they may be needed.
  • The Liferay Portal 6.2 Community Beta program was a smashing success, with over 70 participants, 130 issues reported, and 81 resolved! As you can see, a lot of work went into this release, both from Liferay staff and our generous and ambitious community, and I would like to personally congratulate and thank each and every person who contributed to this release. Participants even got a fancy custom tee shirt for the program! Expect more in the coming months as we march toward more releases!
  • Since the opening of blogs on liferay.com to the community last year, I've seen a lot of really great blogs by many of you. We're going to be making it even more of an exciting adventure in the near future, through regular highlighting of blogs, and adding categorization so you can more easily subscribe and find blogs of interest. In the meantime, we have a new Community Content policy guide which covers things about what is and is not allowed in liferay.com content. Please give it a read if you are contributing on our forums, wikis, or blogs!
  • JavaScript is cool again (but you can still write bad JavaScript)! And several traditionally server-side programming paradigms like MVC are moving into that place where JavaScript has awesome support - the ubiquitous client side browser. Check out Sampsa's experiments with AngularJS!
  • Speaking of Frontends, Liferay's very own Frontend engineer Zeno Rocha (@zenorocha) has been nominated for Net Awards' Young Developer of the Year! Take a moment and vote for Zeno, and let's see if this Liferay guy can make it big time!
  • Do you love Jenkins? We certainly do. We even continuously develop and integrate Liferay with it. Manuel has written a sweet Jenkins Dashboard portlet for Liferay, with awesome status graphics and a nice AlloyUI-based user interface.
  • Nightly builds of portal have begun again (after quietly and accidentally dying for a brief period of time). This is a nightly build of the master portal branch, and is very useful to see if things have been fixed, or to check out upcoming new features. It also likely has bugs, instability, and other attributes of most open source nightlies :) Occasionally the build fails entirely, so there may be a day or two lapse of the builds, but rest assured we know who broke it (evil grin).
  • I am always a fan of clever ways to do things programmatically. Who wants to click and click and click? Check out Daniel's example of programamtically setting workflows on Document Library folders!
  • Radio Liferay is back in action, with some really awesome episodes from Alberto Chaparro, Iliyan Peychev, Daniel Sanz, The folks behind Valamis, and more! If you have pressing questions you'd like answered, head over to the Radio Liferay Google+ Community and ask away!
  • All about versioning of Liferay's document library and how to integrate it into Amazon S3, from our friends at profiq.cz
  • The Liferay Spain office holds regular Tech Talks about focused technical topics in and around Liferay. You can see many of the slides and code at in the repo, and stay tuned for more talks in the future!
  • Getting involved with a local Liferay User Group is one of the best ways to grow your Liferay chops. New user groups in China, Seattle, Tunisia, and Vietnam have started, and are looking for new members! If you are interested in starting your own User Group, there are new resources (and a nice video intro from Savoir-faire Linux) available on the User Group site. And don't miss our user group's and local community's upcoming events, such as Frankfurt, Portland (Oregon), Bangalore, Bloomington (Minnesota), Den Haag, and more!
  • Support RTL (Right-to-left) languages and Bi-directional pages is really important in our multi-cultural and multi-language projects, especially in the Arabic world. Thanks to the work from Iliyan and several others, Liferay now has exceptional support for this, and most of it is automatic.
  • From the releases desk: If you're watching the releases dashboard, you'll know that there have been recent releases of Liferay Portal (6.2), Liferay Faces (3.1.3), Liferay Sync, and Liferay IDE (2.0)! Next up will be Social Office 3.0, and the Liferay Mobile SDK will go Beta. Lots of new goodies to get us started this year!
  • The Liferay conference season gets underway early this year, starting with the popular Portal Solutions Forum in May in Amsterdam. The full schedule will be released soon, with new conferences in many yet-to-be-visited places, so stay tuned!
  • Meera Prince (also a top contributor from Q4 2013) shows us how to open any portlet inside an AlloyUI popup dialog window. Very handy for certain data entry portlets, as you don't lose your place on the page by having to switch pages. Thanks, Meera!
  • Ideas: everyone has them, and they drive innovation into many things in life, including Software. With Liferay's Community Ideas Dashboard, we now have an easy to use tool to let our creativity loose, and get that awesome feature or Marketplace app you've been dreaming of to become reality.
  • Speaking of Marketplace apps, we're up to around 230+ apps on the Marketplace. All of them free, but coming up in Q1 of 2014 will be the ability to sell apps via the E-commerce feature that many of you have been waiting for. Also, for those of you who wish to get notified of new and updated apps, check out the @LiferayApps twitter feed, and don't miss a single update.
  • Lots of awesome and informative blog posts on the community blogroll. A few highlights: The Nitty-Gritty: Theme Improvements and Bootstrap in Liferay, OAuth Client Portlet ImplementationLiferay Portal SSL ConfigurationFast development using Compass/Sass and Liferay PortalMicrobenchmarking Liferay Registry with JMHStaging in Liferay 6.2 - basicsCriando um ADT que acesse a estrutura de um Web Content (em português)

That's all for now. I look forward to seeing all of you out and about in our community, and hope this year brings you peace and prosperity!