Hello BugSquad!

We're coming up on our first milestone build of the next version of Liferay and I'd like to ask the team to take a crack at this sneak peak and review 4 of the new features as outlined in the Milestone 1 preview presentation given at a couple of the Liferay Symposiums this year. If you've been watching the Community Development Board you'll probably know which features I'm talking about!

There's nothing to do for the moment, until the Milestone is built and released (which should happen in the next week or two). But I just wanted to give the team a heads-up that we'll be reviewing the following 4 features:

Application Display Templates
Enterprise Calendar (this links to a collection of stories for the new calendar)
WCM Management User Interface
Recycle Bin

These 4 features are still under active development but the earlier we give feedback to the implementation teams, the better! So keep watching this space for announcements and get your Liferay chops in order.

The process will be the same as was done for 6.1:

• Features are assigned to a subset of the team (though you're free to review them all if you want!)
• Feature guides are distributed to the team
• Review the feature, and provide initial comments in the form (using OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Microsoft Word, or even vi if you are into it!)
• The forms will be posted to Google Docs, and collaboration with the development team(s) occur.
• Bugs or Improvements are filed and implemented.
• Profit!

Thank you for being a part of Liferay, your efforts really do make a difference! And while you're at it, be sure to add your name and list of achievements to the Community Hall of Fame!

Talk to you soon!

Would appreciate if you can tell us the planned schedule of milestones to release. I think most of us are kind of very busy this time of year and would need a allocate time beforehand to do the tasks.

I agree, most of the people are doing this on their own time (when rest of the world is watching TV) .. so the schedule would help.

Also time for testing should be long enough, so there would easier to find time slot to do this.

Idea : When bug squad member produces the bug report. This report should be clear enough to be converted to use case, so it could be tested against on future Liferay builds, by Liferay testing team.

Also, would be nice if you'll upload the test cases to some sites and if we can select the test cases. It'll be better if I can test what I'll use. Some of the functions old and new will almost never be used by some of us - I think this will be different based on users.

Kind of busy this month. One customer installation, one on-going proposal, one new proposal. Will be out most of this week on different projects.

Hey Hitoshi, Sampsa,

We don't have any fixed schedule for milestones, but the goal is definitely to move in that direction. The reason why we are not there yet is that we are also using milestones as a way to make some optimizations to our engineering and release process so that we can make final releases much more predictable. While doing so, we prefer to not fix dates for milestones so that we don't end up working around process issues we find and instead fix them for real.

If you guys can test out at least one of the features of this release it would be awesome. If you can't, no worries, other people will

The next milestone that I have in mind right now would be for second half of December. I'm not 100% sure right now if it will happen or not though. It will depend largely on how this first milestone goes.

So that means that James will send us the features to which we are assigned in the next days and we'd be able to test during 2 or 3 weeks, isn't it?

And in the second half of December, you'll release M2.

The Finnish translations are now 100%, make sure that they are coming also for M1.

Thanks all - you'll have plenty of time for testing, so no worrying about rushing to meet a deadline. The engineering teams will work with individual bugsquad members to ensure any issues are well understood by both the reporter and responsible engineer, and if appropriate, converted to an automated or manual test for future builds. This worked rather well last time, through the use of collaborative documents.

And I saw the Milestone was just pushed to sourceforge today - I'll be sending out the BugSquad forms in the next hour or two!

Recycle Bin looks interesting. I've replaced the Calendar so not very interested in that. Saw you wiki page. If you can extend the deadline to beginning of next year, that'll help because we don't have Christmas holidays here in Japan but do have New Years holiday. :-)

Jorge,
I was hoping you or Brian would be able to make it to the event in Tokyo. I wanted to show you what I wanted directly and Japanese users' reaction to it too.

I see all of the features you mention except the new calendar. Where do you access this in M1? Thanks.

Got sidetracked with the review forms. Will be up shortly. The new Calendar is embodied in a plugin and those are not yet built for the Milestone but I am impressing on our CE build team the importance of having such reviews so I hope we'll see it (and potentially other plugins) built soon. I'll publish the guide and you can always build it yourself and use it with the Milestone.

The 4-week deadline is mainly because we'd like to incorporate feedback and produce another Milestone with those changes, but feedback at any time and from any MIlestone will certainly not be ignored or considered less valuable than feedback received before it. So feel free to take your time over the New Years' Holiday..

Ok team, the review forms are posted to the Milestone 1 Wiki page! With almost 60 members, I think it makes more sense for you to "choose your own adventure" - so you can choose which features to review. There are only 4 of them so far, and they are all exciting (of course I have my favorites) and like Hitoshi and others mention, not everyone will be interested in everything, so if I randomly assign, you might get a feature you have no interest in, and if I ask for assignments up front, it'll take longer than if you just looked at all of them So have at it.

I'll be sending out reminders occasionally and as always this forum exists for questions so if you have any about the process, or about the specific feature, and you want to resolve something before you submit your report, please post them here! I will be watching this space closer than the normal development/user boards, and forwarding any questions as necessary if a specific developer doesn't happen to be watching the forums, as the dev teams want to get as much user feedback as possible, especially on the "new" stuff.

Jorge was right. You do have enough people. 60 people to review 4 feature is an overkill. :-)

Hi James,

Should we make some regression tests?

Could we test upgrading from a prior version? (from 6.0.6 or 6.1.0 or 6.1.1). We know Data stored in old Calendar Portlet won't be upgraded to the new Calendar Portlet as I see this feature is under development. We are interested in this feature as one of our customers use Calendar to achieve appointments with their patients, so we'll test the new Calendar Portlet.

The goal of this new Calendar Portlet is to be better than Google's, Exchange and Zimbra ones? (Just to know if we can add many new feature requests).

Some of the new features in WCM aren't very detailed in JIRA (p.e LPS-27596).

Regards, Luis

Let the testing begin!

There are still the old "wcm structure editor" without new field options. That surely should be on improvement list.

Just to inform that I started with WCM and already have some bugs/suggestions list. But will be doing a bit more test.

I would avoid doing upgrade testing for this build- Milestone 1 is really just the beginning of us getting to the point of being able to do predictable releases, and we have not concentrated on nor tested upgrade scenarios yet. Once the Calendar Migration is implemented, it'll be ready for upgrade testing. Right now, the two calendars (old and new) do not share the same backend, so you'll have parallel calendars for this Milestone (but the plan is definitely to resolve this before release).


The goal isn't to "beat" those per se, but rather to give the features that customers and community are asking for, to meet the use cases of Liferay in its application to enterprise calendaring, to integrate with the rest of Liferay's asset system, and ensure it is extensible. And in this case, it makes more sense to use the more modern AlloyUI to implement the front-end (vs. the JSPs of the "old" calendar), and at the same time, factor the calendar out into a plugin (i.e. out of core, for modularity and the wonderful benefits therein). This of course introduces migration requirements to get from old to new, which, as discussed, is coming in a future milestone.

However, since the point of this feature testing includes identifying key usability gaps or missing functionality, it would be good to include this in your review. There's no promise that your desired features will be implemented, but it's important to identify and prioritize them, and in some cases, even if Liferay doesn't consider a feature as important as you think they are, there may be others in the community that do, and would be willing to implement it, so yeah, add as many new feature requests as you wish! For now, you can use the "Suggestions" wiki, and we are working on a more modern ideation system to enable you to easily suggest ideas, and others to comment/vote on them. I'd also like to include, as part of that, migration of content from the 'suggestions' wiki to this new, as yet unimplemented, system



Yeah, sometimes ticket submitters forget that not everyone is familiar with a particular area. Feel free to ask for additional detail in the ticket or by emailing the developer (for example, if the ticket is closed and you can no longer comment on it). In this case I am sure Juan would be glad to provide additional detail!

I have done some review of new WCM feature, and have here attached my review report (@James, also sent you an email)

Attachments:

BugSquadCEFeatureReviewFormNewWCMManagementUI.docx (386.8k)

I'll be testing WCM, too.

/Dennis

Hey guys,

I want to highlight that as James said, we are mainly interested in a functional review of the milestone. If you find bugs please report them in JIRA (making sure to set the affected version to 6.2.0 M1), but don't look explicitly for them because you may find too many. This release is less-than-alpha quality that didn't go through a QA round before releasing (although the individual code changes did).

This milestone is part of our goal to improve our releases by making it easier for you to see the features we are working on earlier and provider your feedback. I would like to still like to do several milestone releases before we start the beta cycle around mid 2013. As we get closer to that the milestones should be getting better in quality.

BTW, we have decided to highlight 4 of the new features so that we can get more focused feedback. There are several other features also in the milestone that you may find out as you try it out. Some of them are finished and some of them are part of a larger set of changes coming (for example the support for hierarchical sites which will be highlighted in future milestone release). If you want to see a complete list search for completed Stories in JIRA.

One important note for those testing Application Display Templates (ADT), we are going to provide several templates out of the box for each of the applications that have support for this type of templates. These templates were originally written in Velocity but we've decided to convert them to Freemarker. Because of that they didn't make them to the release. You can see a work version of them in a pull request to Brian. I will also try to put them in some other place so that you can easily download them to do your tests of ADT.

Regarding suggestions for improvements, besides the wiki that James mentioned, I would actually prefer if you guys use the message boards category. That makes it easier to have a conversation between everybody interested in that feature. I'm subscribed to that category and while I'm lagging behind right now due to the symposiums I'll do my best in providing timely answers and pointing the right developers to it.

@Luis Mas we are starting to use more and more a new ticket type in JIRA called Story that focuses more on identifying which type of user is benefiting from the improvement/feature and what the benefit is. In other words its title and description will be more end user oriented and easier to understand. Inside, we will create subtasks that are more technical. In the example you mention, LPS-27596, you should look at the parent story for the useful info you are looking for.
@Sampsa The translations were not updated from the latest in Pootle for this release so don't get frustrated if your translations didn't go in.
@Sampsa We are already working in the WCM Structure editor. First we needed to add several features to the new editor (being used in DDL) so that it could be part of WCM as well. Once those are ready (pretty soon) we'll start the integration.

You can find the list with the sample Application Display Templates and the links to download them in the BugSquad - Liferay Portal 6.2 CE Milestone 1 Testing wiki page.

Hi to all,
Calendar Portlet can't be compiled with M1 build because of missing source files.
eg. portal.kernel.dao.orm.ActionableDynamicQuery
portal.kernel.dao.orm.BaseActionableDynamicQuery etc.. etc..
To build correctly get latest github liferay portal and plugins and re-build from scratch.
Just a note for whoever would like to play with calendar portlet
Cheers!

Hi Jorge,

Forgot to thank you for telling us there currently isn't any fixed dates. I can set up my plans on this information while I was having trouble scheduling when date was repeatly changed.
Large Japanese IT companies still work in factory like manner with planning and scheduling. We get hammered when we deviate from schedule we setup. (grim)