Liferay Social Office is a social collaboration solution for the enterprise that streamlines communication, saves time, builds group cohesion and raises productivity. It is built on Liferay Portal, and shares much of its functionality.

What's New

Social Office 2.0.5 CE GA3 contains a variety of bug fixes (see release notes) and is now available for download from Liferay's Marketplace here. For those already using SO CE GA2, you will have the option to upgrade through the Marketplace page in your portal Control Panel (note that EE users must follow special instructions outlined on the Social Office EE Marketplace page). Thanks for your input on our previous release!

• See the Release Notes.

Bug Reporting

As always, the project continues to use the Social Office JIRA site to report and manage bug and improvement tickets. If you believe you have encountered a bug in the new release (shocking, I know), please be cognizant of the bug reporting standards and report your issue on issues.liferay.com, selecting the SOS project and the "2.0.5" release as the value for the "Affects Version/s" field.

Liferay Social Office EE is a social collaboration solution for the enterprise that streamlines communication, saves time, builds group cohesion and raises productivity. It is built on Liferay Portal, and shares much of its functionality.

This release is a commercially-supported product and includes many fixes made since the release of the Community Edition.

New features in Social Office 2.0 EE include:

• Enhanced Document Management – New document previews, document types and a revamped user interface make creating, editing and sharing documents easy, saving time and strengthening collaboration.
• Improved Contacts Center – Social Office users can use the Contacts Center to quickly find other people in the organization with specific areas of expertise or project experience.
• Notifications – Users now receive convenient alerts to new requests, messages or announcements through the notifications center on the dockbar.
• Microblogging – These status messages allow users to broadcast real-time updates to connections and followers and to see other users' posts.
• Enhanced User Management – Liferay's Control Panel allows for simple and intuitive management of Social Office users' membership and roles.

Visit the Social Office EE Marketplace page to get it (or get a 30-day trial!).

Upgrading

Users of previous 1.x versions of Social Office can upgrade to Social Office 2.0 EE by following the Social Office Upgrade Documentation.

Whats next for Liferay IDE?

What up next for Liferay IDE project is version 2.0, which should bring remote portal structured content editing, the much-awaited Maven support along with some better theme development support.  If you want to help with testing these new 2.0 features, just add the Juno nightly build URL below:

• http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/eclipse/juno/nightly/

AlloyUI is a UI metaframework that provides a consistent and simple API for building web applications across all three levels of the browser: structure, style and behavior.  It incorporates three design languages: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

It is used extensively in many of Liferay's open source projects, such as Liferay Portal, Liferay Social Office, and many more!

The latest release, AlloyUI 2.0, incorporates a ton of new features and the project has been re-engineered from the ground up, while providing support for prior releases.

Release Details

Check out Eduardo's Blog post regarding the new release to learn more about how to migrate to this release!

On December 11, 2012 Liferay released the 2^nd General Availability (GA) release of Liferay Faces:

• Liferay Faces 3.1.1-ga2 (JSF 2.0/2.1 + Liferay 6.1.x)

Project Links

• Release Notes
• Documentation
• Downloads
• Demos

Release Highlights

This is a maintenance release that fixes several bugs including a memory leak (documented in FACES-1445). Liferay recommends that all JSF portlet projects be upgraded to this new version. Please refer to the Release Notes for more information.

Thanks to everyone in the community that reported issues, contributed patches, and participated in the forums!

Liferay Sync is Liferay's newest product, designed to make file sharing as easy as a simple drag-and-drop! It exposes and synchronizes content and documents to both desktop and mobile environments with support for Windows, Mac OS, and iOS. It'll also log all your document changes and versions.

With the EE version, Liferay users will have the option of sharing between unlimited Liferay Sites!

• Stay connected to your site while on the go.
• Versioning and revision tracking so all users can seamlessly work on the same file together.
• Shares information in real-time.

Upgrading

• Desktop: Simply replace any previous releases with the new release
• Mobile: Check your device's updates area and update to the latest version of Sync.

Liferay Developer Studio is a branded Eclipse-based product that is built on top of Liferay IDE along with some additional enterprise features (e.g. WebSphere server adapter).  It also contains the latest versions of Liferay Portal EE and Plugins SDK bundled and pre-configured to work out of the box.

The most notable features for this latest 1.6.0 release are:

• Kaleo Designer for Java - Eclipse-based visual designer for Kaleo workflows that is specifically geared for Java developers (see more details below).
• Liferay Portal 6.1 EE GA2 support - Bundled latest versions of Liferay Portal 6.1 EE GA2 along with Plugins SDK and sample projects.
• Liferay IDE 1.6.x - bug fixes from community editon release

Kaleo Designer for Java

Liferay Portal EE already contains a visual Kaleo workflow designer built-in to the Kaleo Forms application.  However, we wanted to create a new tool directly targeted at back-end Java developers, so we decided to add this to our Eclipse-based dev environment, Liferay Developer Studio.  The Kaleo Designer for Java is a multi-page editor that allows editing of Kaleo workflows either as a visual diagram or a XML source editor.  There are also related tools, wizards, and property views, content-assist associated with this visual editor that most Eclipse Java developers have become accustomed to with other tooling.    The biggest productivity enhancements for Java developers in this version is the integration of the Java/Groovy script editor for editing Kaleo workflow action and condition scripts and the Freemarker/Velocity template editor for creating notofication templates.

There will be more available articles and extended documentation about the Kaleo Designer for Java in the upcoming weeks, but for now, instead of posting a lot of screenshots, we decided to record a short demo video instead.
http://vimeo.com/48315976

If you are a Java developer and need to create a new or modiify an existing workflow process in Liferay,  I hope you will give Kaleo Designer for Java a try.

The Liferay team is pleased to announce the release of Liferay Portal 6.1 EE! Liferay Portal 6.1 EE gives organizations one complete web platform for social collaboration, web content management, and development tools to create customized solutions.

Here are some notable features to look for in this release:

• Document sharing through Liferay Sync - Liferay Sync takes the pain out of accessing your files by making them available when you want, wherever you need. With Liferay Sync, documents stored in your Document Library are automatically synced between your mobile, desktop and tablet devices. Since it's synced against your own Liferay deployment - you don't need to worry about security issues that come with public cloud based offerings. There are no file limitations either!

• Completely revamped Document Library - The Document Library has been significantly improved! We've renamed the Document Library to the Documents and Media Library because we're including all file types - documents, images, videos and other media types into one unified library. Here are some of the new features and benefits of the Documents and Media Library:
  • Automatic previews - Get a sneak peek at all your docs, images and videos before downloading them!
  • Business defined document types - Create your own custom document types to adjust to the unique needs of your business. Any available metadata embedded in the file are automatically extracted as well.
  • Desktop-like experience - We've given the UI a complete overhaul for an optimal experience with improvements such as drag and drop, multiple select, and contextual menus.
• Code less and do more with Kaleo Forms and Workflow Designer - Kaleo Forms and Workflow Designer allows your business end users to design and deploy workflow based forms. Users can easily adjust their process to the constant changes in business without IT intervention. 

• Multiple website versions - Need to work on the next version of your website while still maintaining the content on the existing one? No problem. Liferay's enhanced staging feature allows you to simultaneously modify several versions of any site. Multiple content teams can easily create, maintain and publish their version of a site.

• Lists, lists and more lists - Tired of all those stickies on your monitor? Use Liferay's new Dynamic Data List to capture and share your lists with coworkers.

• Mobile websites made easy - You've all heard it: Mobile first, web second. More and more users are accessing your website through mobile and tablet devices. Liferay provides the tools to tailor the content and experience of website visitors based on their device.

• Have it your way with User Customizable Sites - Site administrators can choose certain pages and sections of a page to be personalized by users. Users can choose to add, remove and configure content and applications in the customizable sections while the site administrator controls the fixed areas of a page.

• Manage a large network of affiliated Sites - Need to manage hundreds of similar cookie-cutter Sites? Liferay Sites created from a Site Template can maintain a link to the template. Any changes made to the template will be applied to any Sites linked to it. This allows a Site administrator to easily update and manage hundreds of affiliated Sites that are linked to the same template.

• Integrate with your existing document repositories - Have multiple sources of document storage? Unify access to all your document repositories through Liferay. Liferay provides connectors to Sharepoint, Documentum and other CMIS providers.

Upgrading from Previous Releases

As a general rule, you can upgrade from one release of Liferay to the next. This means that you can upgrade from 5.2 to 6.0, or 6.0 to 6.1, but not directly from 5.2 to 6.1. For 5.2 to 6.1, you would need to progress from 5.2 to 6.0, then 6.0 to 6.1. See the Upgrading Liferay chapter of the Liferay User Guide for more detail on upgrading to 6.1 EE. For users of EE GA1, you can directly upgrade to EE GA2 following normal upgrade procedures found in the documentation.

This is an update release for Liferay Portal, bringing a host of fixes and some improvements based on feedback from the community.

In addition to the numerous bugs that have been fixed since 6.1 GA1, Several new improvements have gone into this release. Highlights include:

• Support for the newly release Liferay Marketplace!
• All security fixes from the Community Security Team
• Support for Danish language [LPS-14931] and fixes for many other languages.

See the full Release Notes for detail.

Upgrading from Previous Releases

As a general rule, you can upgrade from one release of Liferay to the next. This means that you can upgrade from 5.2 to 6.0, or 6.0 to 6.1, but not directly from 5.2 to 6.1. For 5.2 to 6.1, you would need to progress from 5.2 to 6.0, then 6.0 to 6.1. See the Upgrading Liferay chapter of the Liferay User Guide for more detail on upgrading to 6.1. For users of GA1, you can directly upgrade to GA2 following normal upgrade procedures found in the documentation.

Getting Support

Support for Liferay 6.1 CE comes from the wonderful and active community, from which Liferay itself was nurtured into the enterprise offering it is today. Please visit the community pages to find out more about the myriad avenues through which you can get your questions answered. Liferay and its worldwide partner network also provides services, support, training, and consulting around its flagship enterprise offering, Liferay Portal 6.1 EE, an update of which is due to be released shortly after this CE update.

Introduction #

Liferay has released the fifth milestone build of the next version of Liferay. This milestone includes most if not all of the bug fixes based on the feedback from the bug squad in previous milestones, as well as several new features.

Features #

There are many new features included in Milestone 5 that you may be interested in testing. As usual, Liferay is using a JIRA Structure to visualize new features ("Stories") in each Milestone. You can see the Milestone 5 Stories, or visit the overview of Stories for all Milestones.

How to report bugs and suggestions #

We are going to use an slightly different process this time to make the communication fully open.

• Bugs: Create bugs in JIRA making sure you fill the field "Affects Version" specifying the value 6.2.0 CE M4.
  • Important: Please make sure you review the list of bugs reported for Milestone 5 before reporting a new one.
• Suggestions: post your idea in the forum within the Beta Testing category.

The developers working on 6.2 will be monitoring the reported bugs and suggestions to provide timely answers.

Disclaimer: The following information is intended for use for informational purposes only and is subject to change at any time without notice. In particular, release dates are not guaranteed and should not be used for forward-looking guidance or scheduling.

This is an update release for Liferay Portal 6.1, bringing a host of fixes and some improvements based on feedback from the community.

Notable development goals for this update include:

• Important PACL fixes to improve the experience (especially in regard to Marketplace app development)
• Aggregation of all security issues fixed in 6.1

Users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the most recent 6.1 release.

UPDATE: The Q1 date has moved to Q2, due to unforseen complications in PACL and the time needed to test it.

Introduction #

Liferay has released the fourth milestone build of the next version of Liferay. This milestone includes most if not all of the bug fixes based on the feedback from the bug squad in previous milestones, as well as several new features.

Features #

There are many new features included in Milestone 4 that you may be interested in testing. As usual, Liferay is using a JIRA Structure to visualize new features ("Stories") in each Milestone. You can see the Milestone 4 Stories, or visit the overview of Stories for all Milestones.

How to report bugs and suggestions #

We are going to use an slightly different process this time to make the communication fully open.

• Bugs: Create bugs in JIRA making sure you fill the field "Affects Version" specifying the value 6.2.0 CE M4.
  • Important: Please make sure you review the list of bugs reported for Milestone 4 before reporting a new one.
• Suggestions: post your idea in the forum within the Beta Testing category.

The developers working on 6.2 will be monitoring the reported bugs and suggestions to provide timely answers.

Liferay has released the third milestone build of the next version of Liferay. This milestone comes a few weeks after Milestones 1 and 2 and includes most if not all of the bug fixes based on the feedback from the bug squad as well as many several new features.

For details on what's new in this Milestone, check out the BugSquad Milestone 3 Wiki Page.

This build is not suitable for production use and no support or guarantee of any kind is implied.

Bug Reporting

When reporting bugs against this Milestone, be sure to select 6.2.0 CE M3 from for the Affected Version/s field.  Also, consider participating in BugSquad!

BugSquad

BugSquad is a volunteer team, whose main goal is to improve the quality and usability of Liferay project releases before they are generally available. Team members provide valuable feedback from their day-to-day usage of Liferay, incorporating the way they use Liferay directly into the resulting product. In addition, team members gain valuable experience in using the Liferay platform, both in existing features and functionality, and upcoming new features.

Milestone 2 is a small update from Milestone 1, incorporating the following changes:

• New Calendar App is bundled by default
• Continue to refine the Liferay Portal and Liferay Apps (plugins) release process, to increase reliability and quality of each build.
• A few other minor fixes

This build is not suitable for production use and no support or guarantee of any kind is implied.

Bug Reporting

When reporting bugs against this Milestone, be sure to select 6.2.0 CE Mx from for the Affected Version/s field.  Also, consider participating in BugSquad!

BugSquad

BugSquad is a volunteer team, whose main goal is to improve the quality and usability of Liferay project releases before they are generally available. Team members provide valuable feedback from their day-to-day usage of Liferay, incorporating the way they use Liferay directly into the resulting product. In addition, team members gain valuable experience in using the Liferay platform, both in existing features and functionality, and upcoming new features.

Milestone 1 represents an interim build of the next version of Liferay Portal.  It includes many bugfixes and a few notable, but not yet completed features:

• New WCM Management Interface
• Application Display Templates
• Recycle Bin
• Enterprise Calendar

This build is not suitable for production use and no support or guarantee of any kind is implied.  For a complete list of changes, see the Release Notes.

Bug Reporting

When reporting bugs against this Milestone, be sure to select 6.2.0 CE Mx from for the Affected Version/s field.  Also, consider participating in BugSquad!

BugSquad

BugSquad is a volunteer team, whose main goal is to improve the quality and usability of Liferay project releases before they are generally available. Team members provide valuable feedback from their day-to-day usage of Liferay, incorporating the way they use Liferay directly into the resulting product. In addition, team members gain valuable experience in using the Liferay platform, both in existing features and functionality, and upcoming new features.

Disclaimer: The following information is intended for use for informational purposes only and is subject to change at any time without notice.  In particular, release dates are not guaranteed and should not be used for forward-looking guidance or scheduling.

The next version of Liferay, tentatively versioned 6.2, is under development, with an expected release date in late 2013.  This version will incorporate many new features and enhancements in many areas, including, but not limited to

• Mobile
• Cloud
• Analytics
• Platform Improvements
• WCM/WEM/CEM
• Social
• Collaboration
• UX/UXP
• Responsive Web Design

In addition, Liferay continues to improve its release and quality control processes.  If you wish to keep abreast of the latest development efforts, be sure to watch the Community Development Dashboard, and get involved with your open source community.

In addition, Liferay has begun to create new Milestone builds of this release.  Be sure to watch the Releases page for new Milestone builds, and get a first-hand look at all of the improvements to Liferay.

Liferay Social Office is a social collaboration solution for the enterprise that streamlines communication, saves time, builds group cohesion and raises productivity. It is built on Liferay Portal, and shares much of its functionality.

What's New

Social Office 2.0.4 CE GA2 contains a variety of bug fixes (see release notes) and is now available for download from Liferay's Marketplace here. For those already using SO CE GA1, you will have the option to upgrade through the Marketplace page in your portal Control Panel. Thanks for your input on our previous release!

• See the Release Notes.

Bug Reporting

As always, the project continues to use the Social Office JIRA site to report and manage bug and improvement tickets. If you believe you have encountered a bug in the new release (shocking, I know), please be cognizant of the bug reporting standards and report your issue on issues.liferay.com, selecting the SOS project and the "2.0.4" release as the value for the "Affects Version/s" field.

Liferay Social Office EE is a social collaboration solution for the enterprise that streamlines communication, saves time, builds group cohesion and raises productivity. It is built on Liferay Portal, and shares much of its functionality.

This release is a commercially-supported product and includes many fixes made since the release of the Community Edition.

New features in Social Office 2.0 EE include:

• Enhanced Document Management – New document previews, document types and a revamped user interface make creating, editing and sharing documents easy, saving time and strengthening collaboration.
• Improved Contacts Center – Social Office users can use the Contacts Center to quickly find other people in the organization with specific areas of expertise or project experience.
• Notifications – Users now receive convenient alerts to new requests, messages or announcements through the notifications center on the dockbar.
• Microblogging – These status messages allow users to broadcast real-time updates to connections and followers and to see other users' posts.
• Enhanced User Management – Liferay's Control Panel allows for simple and intuitive management of Social Office users' membership and roles.

Visit the Social Office EE Marketplace page to get it (or get a 30-day trial!).

Upgrading

Users of previous versions of Social Office can upgrade to Social Office 2.0 EE by following the Social Office Upgrade Documentation.

Liferay Social Office is a social collaboration solution for the enterprise that streamlines communication, saves time, builds group cohesion and raises productivity. It is built on Liferay Portal, and shares much of its functionality.

What's New

• Installation
• Dockbar Navigation
• Profile
• Dashboard
• Many more!

See the Release Notes.

Bug Reporting

As always, the project continues to use the Social Office JIRA site to report and manage bug and improvement tickets. If you believe you have encountered a bug in the new release (shocking, I know), please be cognizant of the bug reporting standards and report your issue on issues.liferay.com, selecting the SOS project and the "2.0.0" release as the value for the "Affects Version/s" field.

UPDATE: Liferay Faces in Maven Central

On August 22, 2012 Liferay issued a press release announcing the first General Availability (GA) release of Liferay Faces:

• Liferay Faces 3.1.0-ga1 (JSF 2.0/2.1 + Liferay 6.1.x)
• Liferay Faces 3.0.0-ga1 (JSF 2.0/2.1 + Liferay 6.0.x)
• Liferay Faces 2.1.0-ga1 (JSF 1.2 + Liferay 6.1.x)

Project Links

• Release Notes
• Documentation
• Downloads
• Demos

Versioning Scheme

Liferay Faces follows a major.minor.revision versioning scheme:

• Major:
  • 1 = Portlet 1.0 Bridge for JSF 1.2 (JSR 301)
    (Note that Liferay Faces does not support Portlet 1.0)
  • 2 = Portlet 2.0 Bridge for JSF 1.2 (JSR 329)
  • 3 = Portlet 2.0 Bridge for JSF 2.0/2.1 (JSR TBA)
• Minor:
  • 0 = Liferay 6.0.x
  • 1 = Liferay 6.1.x
  • 2 = Liferay 6.2.x (future)
• Revision:
  • May contain bug fixes, improvements, and new features

Release Highlights

We recently announced that Liferay Faces Bridge Certified was certified as JSR 329 Compliant. As a result of this certification, we released a JSF 1.2 compatible version that that developers can use to migrate legacy portlets to Liferay Faces.

Once again, thanks to everyone in the community that reported issues, contributed patches, and participated in the forums!

• http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/eclipse/juno/stable/

• Eclipse Indigo (3.7.x) : http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/eclipse/indigo/stable/
• Eclipse Helios (3.6.x): http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/eclipse/helios/stable/

Notable New Features

• Automated source attachment for Liferay Portal classes
• Added support for supported JSF Component Suites
• Zoom, Print, Save as Image actions available for Service Builder Diagrams

Whats next for Liferay IDE?

What up next for Liferay IDE project is version 2.0, which should bring remote portal structured content editing, the much-awaited Maven support along with some better theme development support.  If you want to help with testing these new 2.0 features, just add the Juno nightly build URL below:

• http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/eclipse/juno/nightly/

** requires nightly build of 6.1.1 portal and 6.1.1 SDK after Jun 21

Release Nomenclature

Following Liferay's versioning scheme established in 2010, this release is Liferay 6.1 CE GA1.  The internal version number is6.1.0 (i.e. the first release of 6.1).  Future CE releases of 6.1 will be designated GA2, GA3, .. and so on.  See below for upgrade instructions from 6.0 and 5.x.

Downloads

You can find the 6.1 release on the usual downloads page.  If you need additional files (for example, the source code, or dependency libraries), visit the additional files page.

New Features

In addition to the numerous bugs that have been fixed since 6.0 GA4, Many new features and improvements have gone into this release. Highlights include:

• Updated Support Matrix - Liferay's general policy is to update our support matrix for each release, testing Liferay against newer major releases of supporting operating systems, app servers, browsers, and databases (we reguarly update the bundled upstream open source libraries to fix bugs or take advantage of new features in the open source we depend on).  For example, we are moving to Tomcat 7.x, MySQL 5.5.x, JBoss AS 7, Geronimo 2.2.1, and others.
• UI Refinements - Too numerous to list here.  Many tasks that used to require a trip to Control Panel (thus losing your UI context) can now be done via the "Manage" menu.  Document Libary has gotten a sweet overhaul.  General improvements in snappiness.  
• Sites - As described in Jorge's blog and now in the official documentation, the Sites concept has been introduced, decoupling a set of pages from an associated community or organization.  This is one of the big conceptual changes in 6.1.
• Setup Wizard - To ease the first-time configuration of a portal (and its associated database), when starting a new instance of Liferay, the optional Setup Wizard will prompt for and configure these items for you.  No more mucking about with portal-ext.properties for those basic configurations everyone wants to do initially.
• Marketplace Support - Groundwork in the form of app hot deploy and marketplace browsing has been introduced into 6.1, gearing up for the opening of the Marketplace later this year.
• Mobile Device Enhancements -  For example,  mobile device rules allow you to configure sets of rules and use those rules to alter the behavior of the portal based on the device being used to access Liferay. You can also access and evaluate rules through custom scripts.
• Social Activity Improvements - Many improvements to the social value system (formerly known as Social Equity).  Check out the official documentation on what's new. 
• JSON Web Service Improvements - A lot of work has been done in this area, making it much easier to invoke Liferay's services using REST-like (AtomPub-based) JSON (e.g. through supplied JavaScript libraries, or through standard HTTP requests).  Online documentation is also available (check out http://localhost:8080/api/jsonws on your local install. Sweetness!)
• Asset Publisher Improvements - The darling of the supplied out-of-box portlets, Asset Publisher can now do things like showand publish content from/to multiple scopes, better linking behavior for assets, and many more.
• Content Management Goodness - One of Liferay's core strengths is its simple yet powerful Web Content Management System.  There have been many usability and functional improvements to it, including inline drag/drop structure editing, internationalized web content titles, preloading of structures on template creation, selection of default display pages, and more!
• Search Improvements - Lots of performance and accuracy improvements.  Including users in search results.  
• Unification of the Document Library and Image Gallery - these two apps have historically overlapped each other - that overlap has now been eliminated, by combining the two into a Documents and Media app (with a much fancier UI to boot).  
• Multiple Repository Mounting.  In the new Documents and Media app, you can now mount multiple repositories (e.g. through CMIS) and develop custom connectors to link to existing CMS repositories.  Features that overlap with Liferay are respected (e.g. permissioning, locking, etc).
• Native support for storing and serving videos and other media types - Liferay now includes preview functionality for rendering PDFs and other common document formats in-browser, eliminating the need for external apps to view.  In addition, audio and video can be captured and played back from within Liferay.
• Robust content metadata management - New metadata management tools and UIs to easily capture extra metadata related to documents, for efficient searching and categorization of documents.  Sales team uploading this year's financial data?  Let them enter the "bottom line" numbers into well defined metadata fields for easy sorting and searching.
• Establishing contextual relationships between content types - with the Related Assets feature, any asset can be dynamically related to any other asset, for easy cross-referencing.  For example, link to a document in a meeting request, or relate a forum post to a blog entry.  Relations can be mined and analyzed later.
• Enhanced staging support (including Site Branching, Versioning, and Rollback).  A major overhaul of the staging feature, Liferay allows concurrent editing of sites, with versioning and rollback (undo/redo) of changes on the fly.
• Dynamic Site and Page Templates - One can now create an entire site based on a site template.  When changes are made to the template, the changes are automatically (and smartly) applied to any derived sites.  Sites can later be unlinked if needed, allowing independent forking.
• User Customizable Pages - Allows your users to customize certain areas of a site's pages, while keeping other areas fixed.
• User Defined Lists (Dynamic Data Lists) - A very powerful feature that allows one to create a custom data list based on a user-specified schema.  Data can be extracted for reporting, or any other use.
• Unified User Management - Liferay has always had the ability to be your central directory of users.  The management of said users has not always been easy.  In Liferay 6.1, users and their associated organizations can be viewed hierarchically, allowing easy navigation into your user directory.
• OpenSocial 1.1 Support - this includes the new pub/sub feature from OpenSocial.
• Enhancements for Liferay IDE - It's never been easier to develop for the Liferay Platform, using the latest features of Liferay 6.1 and the Liferay IDE.  Liferay 6.1 now includes a remote server deployment plugin, allowing development against a remote instance of Liferay.  Simply throw a switch to publish your tested changes to a production environment.
• More social networking and collaboration feaures (too many to list them all!) - anonymous comments that are later associated with you when you sign up, follow support, related assets, social activity improvements (already discussed above), wiki images, setting threads as questions by default, and, and.. well.. just try it!
• Better Scalability
• Better Auditing, Management and Monitoring
• Better Documentation
• Better Security
• Better Quality
• ... And more!

Documentation

Bug Reporting

Upgrading

As a general rule, you can upgrade from one release of Liferay to the next.  This means that you can upgrade from 5.2 to 6.0, or 6.0 to 6.1, but not from 5.2 to 6.1.  For 5.2 to 6.1, you would need to progress from 5.2 to 6.0, then 6.0 to 6.1.  See the Upgrading Liferay chapter of the Liferay User Guide for more detail on upgrading to 6.1.

Getting Support

Support for Liferay 6.1 CE comes from the wonderful and active community, from which Liferay itself was nurtured into the enterprise offering it is today.  Please visit the community pages to find out more about the myriad avenues through which you can get your questions answered.

Liferay and its worldwide partner network also provides services, support, training, and consulting around its flagship enterprise offering, Liferay Portal 6.1 EE, which is due to be released shortly after this CE release.

What's Next?

Of course we in the Liferay Community are interested in your take on the new features and improvements in Liferay 6.1.  Work has already begun on the next evolution of Liferay.  If you are interested in learning more about how you can get involved, visit theLiferay Community pages and dig in.  

This version of Liferay Portal internally code named Bunyan, was released as Liferay Portal 6.  Previously the team had considered naming the version 5.3 as a follow on to Liferay Portal 5.2  However, after review of the set of features and the future development strategy for our customers and community, it was decided to release with a major version number change.  

Some major features to consider within Liferay Portal 6.0 are:

Alloy is a UI metaframework that provides a consistent and simple API for building web applications across allthree levels of the browser: structure, style and behavior.

It incorporates three design languages: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

It is used extensively in many of Liferay's open source projects, such as Liferay Portal, Liferay Social Office, and many more.

AlloyUI is developed primarily by 2 people, with many other contributors in Liferay. The project is developed by Nate Cavanaugh, Liferay's Director of UI Engineering, and Eduardo Lundgren, a senior software engineer at Liferay.

The JSP portion that exists is primarily headed and overseen by Julio Camarero, with Simon Zhang.

You can keep up-to-date by following any of the following blogs:

• Nate's blog
• Eduardo's blog
• Julio's blog