Let's Talk About Liferay Upgrade Experiences

[J Helmberger, modificado hace 15 años.]

Hello everyone, first post. =)

My organization has conducted an evaluation of enterprise portals and Liferay has come out near the top.

However, one of the unanswered questions we have concerning Liferay upgrades.

You can always find individual posts that refer to specific issues people have faced, but I guess the question I pose is more general.

Have you, as users of Liferay, found the upgrades to be easy? moderate? difficult? tolerable? unbearable? a piece of cake?

Have there been significant differences in difficulty based on incremental or full point releases --or-- has difficulty arose simply from the specifics of what is in a particular release? For longtime users is there a specific release which stood out as more painful than others?

Have the issues been with Liferay application code? your custom code? data? themes?

Any thoughts you can share on this are greatly appreciated.

Thanks so much in advance,

jon

[Mercer Traieste, modificado hace 15 años.]

Hello!

So far we didn't encounter serious issues on upgrading; we've mostly used custom components. Most of these ideas are obvious.

Concerning custom apps:
- All custom code should handle liferay upgrades without modifications.
- All specific platform issues should be handled by the build tool (ant).
- The web app packaging should be handled by the build tool.
- All liferay api calls should be isolated, thus any api incompatibilities on upgrade should only affect a small code area.
- Liferay database should be kept separated from the custom database.

Concerning themes:
- If the sdk is used, theme upgrade should be easy, as custom elements are kept separately.

Concerning modified liferay code
- These would be the most affected by an upgrade.
- Every change should be well documented.
- If a liferay plugin portlet needs to be seriously modified, you could consider writing it from scratch, liferay provides acces to most components through apis (image gallery, document manager); thus, for data management (administration), liferay portlets can be used, and for data display, custom portlets.