Olaf Kock

Paris Pre-Symposium Community Meeting, 5. June 2013

2013-05-06T09:37:16Z

Nous sommes heureux d'annoncer un pre-Symposium évènement communautraire le 5 Juin 2013 au Caveau Montpensier: 15, rue de Montpensier, 75001 Paris, à partir de 18h00. L’évènement est gratuit et nous vous offrirons quelques boissons et snacks lors de la soirée. Veuillez confirmer votre présence en commentant ci-dessous ce blog. Votre confirmation sera appréciée et utile dans l'organisation de l'événement.
Passez le mot aux autres ...plus nous serons, meilleur ce sera !

We are happy to announce a pre-Symposium Community Meeting on June 5th 2013 at Au Caveau Montpensier : 15, rue de Montpensier, 75001 Paris, from 18:00 onwards. Attendance is free and the first couple of rounds of drinks and snacks are on us! Please let us know if you plan to come & join us by commenting below this blog post. Your confirmation will much be appreciated and helpful in planning the event.
Now, please help spread the word… the more the merrier!

Radio Liferay Episode 25: Eduardo Lundgren and Zeno Rocha (AlloyUI)

2013-04-24T10:04:43Z

As a preview for AlloyUI was just released (together with the new website) I took the opportunity to have another episode about the UI layer. Luckily two members of the core team, Eduardo Lundgren (with Liferay since 2007/8) and Zeno Rocha (Sep 2012) volunteered. (Eduardo was mentioned already in episode 3 with Nate Cavanaugh, Zeno has joined Liferay since then. Both of them are members of the brazilian team.)

We start with their history and

Zeno's project jquery boilerplate. He's also one of the founders of the Brazil JS foundation
Rosetta Stone, no longer hidden but very prominent on the website, comparing jQuery, YUI, AlloyUI
The traumatic transition time in 2010 between Liferay 5.2 and 6.0, when AlloyUI replaced jQuery
How Zeno got assimilated into Liferay
The new website for AlloyUI with Tutorials, Examples and Documentation (alloyui.com)
What's new in AlloyUI 2.0, when will it come into Liferay?
Feedback from the community (portuguese video on youtube)
Can I run different versions of YUI on the same site/page (as I can with jQuery within YUI with the help of YQuery)?
who else is using AlloyUI or contributing to it?
Zeno will be speaking at Jax 2013
Honorable mention of the library that YUI is unofficially built on top of.
TaglibGenerator: A tool to generate taglibs and integrate them with Javascript/AlloyUI
Integration of taglibs into Liferay IDE/Developer Studio (Link to Greg's Episode)
AlloyUI on twitter and stackoverflow

If you want to see more from Eduardo and Zeno, they also opened the recent 24 hour webcast "Day of Liferay" and the recording is available (click their names to go directly to the video), or follow @eduardolundgren and @zenorocha

You'll find this episode - and make sure that you don't miss any of the future episodes - by subscribing to http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadioLiferay. You can also subscribe on itunes.: Just search for "Radio Liferay" or just "Liferay" in the podcast directory.

Day of Liferay - what will I do?

2013-04-08T10:27:37Z

Not long until the Day of Liferay - I'll have 30 minutes to fill, and this is what I intend to cover:

A part of my job is in presales, answering all kinds of questions about what Liferay can or cannot do. Some features are almost there, but require a bit of custom development. Now when I reassure customers that this change is actually not that deep, and easy to maintain, I'm doing this before we build a trust relationship (after all, it's presales and customers easily assume you rather overpromise)

I'm planning to demonstrate a few POC plugins that I stumbled upon when I was wondering myself how easy it would be to add certain features. This involves

Extending the Blogs Portlet to be able to host podcasts
Rediscovering drag&drop hints that indicate dropzones in Layout templates (for arranging portlets on the page)
Assisting in the translation process
Making a portlet's performance reports well visible
and others, maybe we get to some interactivity here

Also, you might have realized that the publication frequency for Radio Liferay continues to be low - sorry for that. I'd like to cover more external content - talk to actual users and know about their work with Liferay. For this I'd like to collect pointers, feedback and ideas on how to continue with this format. Any volunteers?

Lastly, I'm constantly collecting Well Hidden Features. If you have any that you find worth mentioning, please bring them with you. They might be obvious for you, but eye-opening for others.

See you Wednesday, 10:30 CEST, 8:30 UTC, I'm working hard to regain my voice until then.

Community Meeting in Rome/Italy on 7. March

2013-03-06T17:55:53Z

I'll be in Rome on 7. March 2013 and would like to keep up the infrequent habit to meet members of the community.

Unfortunately so far nobody answered with their intent to come - and my favoured venue just replied late that they'll have a concert that night, so it will be loud and crowded. So, I've opted for a low-effort meeting (at least for me): I've decided for Eur Suite Hotel at Via Prezzolini, 5, 00144 Roma and will be in the hotel bar from 19:00 on (if you're late (or early) and can't find us, ask at reception). I know, this is not central Rome, but given the current feedback situation is the one that I can cover easiest.

In case you still need motivation to come: I have a budget for beer and will be happy to share experiences (yours or mine)

If you want to come, please comment here or on twitter. You can also show up unexpected, but will make my life easier if you let me know upfront.

The current favourite location is close to Piazza dell'Emporio, quite central - but as I didn't yet hear back from the place, I'll leave it vague for now, but now you have a feeling of the distance to whereever you are.

~~As I don't know my way around in town I rely on your help with regards to the location:~~

My hotel is in Eur, close to Metro Laurentina - I know that this is not too central, but this is where I need to go back to in the evening. I'm taking suggestions where we could hold such a meeting (open for a central location that has not-too-complex travel back to Eur). Please comment on this blog entry or reply on twitter (@olafk) with location suggestions, remember to give travel directions and size of the location. Ideal would be a coworking space or a pub that has some space - e.g. is not too crowded on Thursdays.

~~Also, please give some feedback - either here or on twitter - if you intend to come, so that we get a rough idea of the expected group size.~~

~~I'll update this blog entry with the final location the day before the meeting. Last minute changes might go out on twitter, so check back.~~

Looking forward to meet you

Displaying portlet monitoring information

2013-02-11T14:10:52Z

Exposing well hidden features

Those of you who attended my "Well Hidden Features of Liferay" presentation at the 2012 european symposium might remember the well hidden monitoring information that LIferay is able to hide at the bottom of each page, in HTML comments (when configured properly). (You can also listen to the recording of this presentation on Radio Liferay) The slide that I used in the presentation was probably the one with the most text I ever used on any slide (the background is a beautified version of what you find on a page, the foreground is a beautified version of one line):

I have created a very simple and straightforward plugin that will display the same information, well visible and organized at the bottom of the page - note that the configuration required remains the same. This is a sample output that you'll find at the bottom of each page with this plugin:

Name	Namespace	Description	Duration	User	Status	URL/DisplayName	Timeout/Portlet Id	Attributes	Type
103	c.l.m.Portlet	null	0	null	SUCCESS	Tags Compiler	103		RENDER
56	c.l.m.Portlet	null	36	null	SUCCESS	Journal Content	56_INSTANCE_JaLJR3MQtAYm		RENDER
101	c.l.m.Portlet	null	130	null	SUCCESS	Asset Publisher	101_INSTANCE_0BVmhEtIm8dR		RENDER
/h/c/t/portal.jsp	c.l.m.Portal	Portal Request	629	null	SUCCESS	.../portal.jsp.jsp_display	-1

There's nothing fancy except the abbreviations (in italics): If you hover the mouse over them, you'll see what they're abbreviated from. If you can make use if this information - e.g. to find performance bottlenecks in your plugins and pages - this might be valuable information right at your fingertip. Feel free to use this as a starting point and explore more interactive and better solutions to display this data. Or deploy this to your test environment and parse the output to test for a specific portlet's performance.

Where is it?

You can find this plugin in its own branch on github: The only "actual" file that changes anything is bottom_monitoring.jsp - in the interest of keeping the implementation in a simple hook, everything is contained in that jsp.

Documentation for the required configuration is included in its README.html (or see the raw version on github on github)

Radio Liferay Episode 24: Zsolt Balogh, LESA

2013-02-01T22:23:00Z

This is another episode recorded at the European Symposium 2012 in Wiesbaden. Zsolt Balogh, head of Liferay's Support for the EMEA reason talks about the pain points that led to developing a custom issuetracker and support management system. Enterprise customers know what he's talking about: Liferay is using LESA to handle support issues, fix and escalate them. To follow the visual part of the presentation, please go to the symposium's download page

Zsolt starts by laying out why Jira was fine for a single project (and it continues to be in use at issues.liferay.com), but not so much for the way we're supporting the enterprise customers.

After introducing the problem space, he's going through implementation timeline, migration, features and requirements, as well as later evolution of the system (naturally, LESA is still being actively developed and extended). Also, there are lots of metrics and how they are helping to improve service or efficiency growing the team.

You'll learn how Liferay's support teams were organized internally over the time and where we're heading to. At Liferay, we're not eating our own dogfood, we're rather drinking our own champagne. Where we don't do this now, we're planning to do so very soon. LESA is part of the activity to move a lot of functionality from 3rd party software into Liferay (or to integrate that software into the portal).

Radio Liferay Episode 23: Olaf Kock, Well Hidden Features

2013-01-07T13:38:04Z

New year's resolution: Publish more podcast episodes. Let's start - Happy New Year, wishing you all the best for 2013...

This is a solo episode with yours truly. I had a lot of fun preparing and presenting this session, "Well Hidden Features", at the european symposium 2012 in Wiesbaden/Germany, as well as in Milano. They both built upon earlier presentations at the nordic and french symposiums and have been used as inspirations for other presentations at the north american as well as the spanish symposium. So, if you were at any of these symposiums, there's a good chance that you've heard some of the content.

Also, if you're working with Liferay for some time, there's another good chance for you to know some of the tipps&tricks already. As I mention at the beginning of the recording: This all is trivial knowledge - but in order to be trivial knowledge, it first has to be known - and I hope there's something in it even for the more experienced among you.

For those who want to read along the slides for this presentation: They can be found on the download page for the european symposium

Some of the topics you'll find in this episode

Memory Management and configuration
What to do when operating a bundle
Neat features for builtin portlets and hacks I use on liferay.com/radio
My favourite generator for UTF-8 test data
How to use jQuery within AUI, and how to learn the differences between the two (and YUI)
Extending Plugins
two simple checkboxes in eclipse that made me unlearn the most simple and basic things
A usecase that you did not know about the scripting console (disclaimer: found out that this works only once)
An easy way to learn how to use the Liferay API to create users, pages, content etc.
Getting debug information from your running production portal
Activating some monitoring information
My 2 cents about http and https and the largely unknown protocol relative URLs
Places where you didn't expect to find great documentation
portal-ext.properties caveats and properties that you might not want to keep in their default values

You'll find this episode - and make sure that you don't miss any of the future episodes - by subscribing to the RSS feed, on itunes or with your podcatcher of choice - you'll find all the options on www.liferay.com/radio. And if you want to get notified when the next episode is out, follow @RadioLiferay

And please remember to rate this podcast in your podcast directory of choice and provide feedback here on the episodes as well. Thank you.

Radio Liferay Episode 22: Samuel Kong on Security

2012-12-02T08:04:11Z

Yes, I know. I didn't keep my previous promise to quickly follow up with the next episode. Thus, I'm not promising again, only revealing that I'm planning to be quicker in future.

This is another episode recorded at the previous Liferay Retreat. I sat together with Samuel Kong, GM of the chinese office and member of Liferay's security team.

As I've been carrying this recording around for quite some while, note that there have been some changes during the last year. First and foremost, we have a new community security team, which was not around at the time of the recording. I'm planning to talk to someone from that team soon (consider yourself warned if you're on that team)

Some of the topics you'll find in this episode

How to file a security issue - thankfully he is consistent with what Cynthia and Michael have reported: go to issues.liferay.com, file your issue under the component "security", optionally with private visibility. If you've already done so, please try if your issue is reproducible in the latest available version - your issue might already have been reported and fixed.
OWASP (The Open Webapplication security project) site is a good resource for learning about security in Webapplications in general, independent of Liferay.
The three tools that Liferay has built-in, helping you to prevent security issues:
- Redirects: Some Properties, configuring the list of domain names and IPs, that Liferay is allowed to redirect to
- CSRF: Auth-Token
- XSS: The various escape-methods in com.liferay.portal.kernel.util.HtmlUtil - There are so many because the correct escaping depends on the context for which one escapes some HTML-Text. Also, the AlloyUI Taglibs help a lot when you're displaying user-content in forms. And also: The "escapedModel" that you can get from ServiceBuilder.
- Bonus: SqlInjection and its prevention through ServiceBuilder.
When to escape HTML text in order to be most flexible.
Sidenote: A call to extract and read the full portal.properties: A long, boring and interesting read. Oh, and the dtds for xml files

And please remember to rate this podcast in your podcast directory of choice and provide feedback here on the episodes as well. Thank you.

Nightliferay in Milano (Community meetup) prior to italian symposium

2012-11-13T15:38:01Z

If you're coming to the italian symposium, why not come to the community meetup the night before. All the details are in the italian usergroup's messageboard and wiki.

Presenze presunte il 15-11-2012, h18:30 in poi, alla Piedra del Sol, Via Cornalia 2, 20124 Milano - 02 6691901. Please register in the wiki.

Community Meetup at the European Symposium

2012-10-08T11:28:30Z

If you are attending this year's european symposium, make sure to be one night early. As last year, we'll have a community meetup the night before. As we have a new venue this year, the meetup will be in Coyote, Wiesbaden (see Map below) on Monday, 15. October 2012, probably 19:00, but check back here, we still need to fix this).

This will be a free event. In order to plan at least a bit, please comment under this blog post if you intend to come. If you need more arguments to go: There will be snacks and drinks. Coyote is a 5-10 minutes walk from the symposium location, Kurhaus, easy to reach from whereever you are in Wiesbaden.

Community Meeting: Dortmund / Lünen, 23. August 2012

2012-08-16T09:09:45Z

Für die, die's noch nicht gesehen haben, möchte ich gern die Werbetrommel rühren für das Treffen der Liferay Usergroup Dortmund am 23. August 2012 in Lünen. (Details)

Timo Grütter organisiert dieses und bittet um Rückmeldung für die Planung - von den vielen möglichen Kanälen biete ich mal Xing oder das Forum der Usergroup an.

Es wird u.a. einen Vortrag über JSF geben, ggf. auch mehr.

European Symposium: Call For Participation

2012-08-06T09:11:58Z

Registration for the European Symposium (16./17. October 2012 in Wiesbaden/Germany - close to Frankfurt) has opened. Also, the Call for Participation is still open. We're looking for thought-provoking, eye-opening sessions that showcase interesting ways you've used the Liferay Platform to meet your business needs. If you've got an illuminating story, useful lessons learned, or noteworthy insights, we want to hear from you!

Customer Case studies, Experience Reports, Neat Plugins and extensions as well as your findings during the creation of these - all are welcome.

While the deadline is 31. August, you can help us ease the process if you submit earlier (and use the form we provide to make sure you think of all required information).

Also, consider submitting a Lightning Talk - easier submission, lots of fun and high information density - each Lightning Talk presentation will be at 7 minutes max - it's been a good success last year.

Community Meeting in Athens/Greece

2012-07-31T09:53:34Z

Γεια σας, Hello greek community members.

I'll be in Athens and would like to take the opportunity to call for a community meeting there, on Thursday, August 2, 2012, 19:00, at CoLab Workspace, Petraki 28, Athens (google map).

Please comment here at the blog post if you'd like to come or contact me on twitter. It helps to know how many people to expect. And, yes, there will be drinks.

More updates (especially short notice) also on twitter.

Looking forward to meet you all soon. Please help to spread the word!

Radio Liferay Episode 21: Jim Hinkey. Bringing back Javadocs

2012-05-31T13:07:08Z

My apologies for the long break in publishing the episodes - I got distracted with a lot of work and once there is an interruption of a habit, you probably know how hard it is to get back into it. I hope to be on track again now and will publish the archive of already recorded episodes soon - and produce more of them.

This is another episode recorded at the previous Liferay Retreat. I sat together with Jim Hinkey, Knowledge Engineer and part of Liferay's knowledgement and documentation team, since March 2011. He took over ownership of the developer's guide and is the guy to bring back javadoc to Liferay (more about this and how/why Liferay once lost its javadoc at the end of this episode)

We talked about

How Jim found Liferay
Life in Raleigh/NC
One of his biggest chokes, the (re)creation of javadocs for Liferay
The process that Javadoc now has to go through in order to get into the product
and other topics

As I managed to get short hold of Brian Chan, I had the opportunity to ask two more quick questions - one about the day when Liferay lost all of its javadoc and one sneaky question about consistency with the example of ThemeDisplay. If you - like me - always wondered where this name came from, you'll have to listen to this episode.

Last but not least, pardon the pun, but this was too good to be true - I just had to include this:

(The source for this cartoon is geekandpoke, licensed under Creative commons by-sa 3.0. Thank you so much, Oliver Widder)

And please remember to rate this podcast in your podcast directory of choice and provide feedback here on the episodes as well. Thank you.

Call for Papers: Symposiums all over europe

2012-03-18T15:33:15Z

The symposium season has started again - lots of exciting upcoming symposiums in April and May in europe. While you have the chance to meet the Liferay folks in person, there will be room for a lot more than just this. We rely on your input for the presentations as well.

For this reason the Call For Paper is open again - we're looking for all kinds of interesting input: Including, but not limited to Customer Case studies, new technologies, experience reports. What have you integrated with Liferay? What particular functionality are you using? Which did you extend or use in a creative way?

The next symposiums will be:

Nordic (Stockholm), covering the nordic region: 25. April
Hungary (Budapest), covering central and eastern europe: 17. May
France (Paris), covering the french-language countries: 23. May

While the Nordic and Hungarian symposiums will be predominantly in english, we encourage you to suggest french presentations and customer case studies for the Paris symposium. However, please make sure your presentation submission is in english, state clearly the language that you're going to hold them in.

We want to make this exciting for the participants - get us excited with your submission as well. Tell us why you make a difference. If you have a video of yourself performing on stage or testimonials from other events: Add or link them. If you are going to include an unexpected spin: Mention it.

Note: The dates given are the actual symposium dates. if you want to submit a presentation, please note the deadline given on the announcements linked. If you just want to participate, note the early bird booking deadlines and get a great deal.

Radio Liferay Episode 20: Bruno Admin's Alter Ego Bruno Farache

2012-03-06T21:34:01Z

This is another celebrity show: I sat together with one of the well known faces of Liferay, giving a voice to it: You might know Bruno Farache better as his Alter Ego, Bruno Admin. If you ever installed Liferay CE, you probably know at least his portrait image which is the administrator's face greeting you on the default homepage and the one that you impersonate in order to make your first administrative steps.

We talked about

Bruno started 2007 with a Liferay Training in L.A.
founded the office as General Manager in Recife, Brazil in 2009
his experience with dressing up in the L.A. office
starting at Liferay (with the office rented from a church) meant that Bruno could tell his mother that he went to church every day
how he became Bruno Admin, seemingly taking the role from Julio, and what this means for attending a gym
Instead of handing out autographs, he got his own "flair", a pin that was handed out at the annual retreat for everybody who knew the password. Check out how much of the password he knows himself ;-)
The setup and responsibilities of the brazilian office and what he does in the time he's not "generally managing"
His responsibilities in Liferay Sync and the mobile story for the iOS and Android version
(some brags about my personal pet-peeve, Linux support for Sync ;-) )
What my previous company had in common with Liferay (hint: Name duplication - or triplication)

And please remember to rate this podcast in your podcast directory of choice and provide feedback here on the episodes as well. Thank you.

Liferay 6.1 EE ab sofort verfügbar

2012-02-23T20:39:14Z

[Czech] [Español] [English] [Hrvatski] [中国的] [Português]

Liferay 6.1 EE ist ab sofort verfügbar! Liferay 6.1 EE stellt Ihnen eine Plattform für Kollaboration, Content Management und Entwicklung Ihrer eigenen, maßgeschneiderten Werkzeuge und Anwendungen bereit.

Einige bemerkenswerte Features dieser Version:

Dokumentenverteilung mit Liferay Sync - Liferay Sync macht den Zugriff auf Dateien aus der Liferay Dokumentenbibliothek extrem einfach - Ihre Daten sind immer verfügbar wenn und wo Sie sie benötigen. Mit Liferay Sync werden Dokumente automatisch zwischen Ihren mobilen, Desktop- und Tablet-Rechnern abgeglichen. Da die Dokumente auf Ihrer eigenen Plattform bereitgestellt werden, müssen Sie sich keine Gedanken über den Zugriff fremder Hoster machen wie in anderen, Cloud-basierten Angeboten. Liferay Sync ermöglicht unlimitierten Zugriff auf Liferay Portal EE.

Runderneuerte Dokumentenbibliothek - Liferay's Dokumentenbibliothek wurde stark überarbeitet und verbessert. Sie hört jetzt auf den Namen Dokumenten- und Medienbibliothek, weil sie jetzt alle Datentypen - Dokumente, Bilder, Videos und andere Medientypen in einer einheitlichen Umgebung verwaltet. Hier ein paar Beispiele, was diese Bibliothek leistet:
- Vorschau - Sehen Sie eine Vorschau auf den Inhalt der Dateien, bevor Sie sie herunterladen
- Konfigurierbare Dokumententypen - Sie können Metadaten abhängig vom (frei definierbaren) Dokumententypen erfassen und im Dokumenttypen hinterlegen. Metadaten, die bereits in den Dokumenten enthalten sind, werden selbstverständlich automatisch extrahiert.
- Responsive Oberfläche - Die Benutzeroberfläche wurde neu gestaltet und ermöglicht jetzt die Manipulation von Daten mittels Drag&Drop, Mehrfachauswahlen und kontextabhängigen Menüs - als würden Sie lokal mit Ihren Daten arbeiten.
Kaleo Forms and Workflow Designer: Mehr erledigen mit weniger Aufwand: Kaleo Forms und Workflow Designer ermöglichen Ihren Business-Benutzern, Workflows und workflowabhängige Formularanwendungen selbst zu erstellen. Benutzer können sehr einfach Ihre eigenen Prozesse an geänderte Anforderungen anpassen ohne die zentrale IT-Abteilung einzuspannen.

Mehrere Websiteversionen - Bereiten Sie mehrere Versionen ihrer Website parallel vor? Arbeiten Sie an der nächsten Version während die aktuelle noch ein paar Updates benötigt? Kein Problem mit den neuen Staging-Features. Sie verwalten einfach mehrere Versionen Ihrer Seite zur gleichen Zeit und veröffentlichen die gerade benötigte. Auch mehrere Teams können so gleichzeitig ihre verschiedenen Kampagnen vorbereiten.

Listen, Listen und noch mehr Listen - Liferays neue "Dynamic Data List" erlauben Ihnen alle Ihre Notizen und Informationen zentral zu verwalten und mit Ihren Kollegen zu teilen.

Mobile Websiten einfach erstellen - Mobile Plattformen nehmen immer mehr Raum ein: Liferay bringt jetzt die Werkzeuge mit, die Sie brauchen, um mobile und klassische Benutzer mit maßgeschneiderten Angeboten zu versorgen. Liefern Sie passende Inhalte abhängig vom jeweiligen Endgerät (z.B. Telefon, Tablet, Desktop-Browser) aus.

Sites, durch Benutzer veränderbar - Administratoren können Teile einer Site zur Bearbeitung durch Benutzer freigeben. Eine solche Seite lässt sich einfach per Mausklick wieder auf einen geänderten Standard anpassen und zeigt Benutzern an, dass eine neue Vorlage erstellt wurde. Bestimmte Teile der Seite können als unveränderbar klassifiziert werden, so dass der Rest einer Seite jederzeit an individuelle Anforderungen angepasst werden kann.

Verwaltung vieler zusammengehöriger Sites - Benötigen Sie hunderte ähnlicher Sites? Mit Liferay Site Templates können Sie einfach neue Sites erstellen. Alle Änderungen am Template erscheinen automatisch auf den damit erstellten Sites während direkte Änderungen an den einzelnen Sites natürlich weiterhin bestehen bleiben. Auf diesem Wege können Siteadministratoren hunderte Sites gleichzeitig aktualisieren.

Integrieren Sie bestehende Dokumentmanagementsysteme - Haben Sie bereits bestehende Dokumentsammlungen - z.B. in Sharepoint, Documentum oder CMIS-kompatiblen Systemen? Diese können Sie einfach als externes Repository an Liferay's Dokumenten- und Medienbibliothek anbinden.

Und das ist erst der Anfang. Liferay 6.1 EE enthält über 100 neue Features und über 400 Verbesserungen. Lesen Sie genaueres im User Guide oder probieren Sie es einfach aus: Eine Testversion gibt es hier.

Radio Liferay Episode 19: Juan Fernandez about community and WCM

2012-02-21T13:56:49Z

In this episode I spoke with Juan Fernandez, starting with an embarrassing nonpronouciation of his family name. Juan is a Liferay core engineer in the spanish office, working mainly in the WCM parts of Liferay, also doing training.

We talked about

how Juan started with the task to integrate Liferay with Pentaho, becoming a community member and later joining the spanish office
How Consulting findings are fed back into the product and what Juan did for the internationalization and localization of content in 6.1, default data for structures, related content, etc. (lots of new features for version 6.1 here)
Juan's demo at the european symposium and what he did when he created a basic application within the WCM system
If you have already implemented new custom Assets you don't need to do anything to get "related assets" functionality
the spanish community, contributing features, plugins or other add ons, taking the examples of Jack Rider of xmlportletfactory fame, Aritz Galdos of Lifedroid, Juan Gonzalez (who contributed preview features for the document library)
the french community, e.g. Leo Pratlong, who did some translations. (Juan also speaks french and helps out in the french community)
...and other topic

(I think I finally learnt how to pronounce the "z" in spanish names - challenge me when you meet me next time)

This is another recording I did with some new recording gear, but, being new gear, I messed up the levels so I had to denoise it a bit, unfortunately a bit of noise still remains. I'm doing my best to get rid of that in future recordings.

And please remember to rate this podcast in your podcast directory of choice and provide feedback here on the episodes as well. Thank you.

Radio Liferay Episode 18: Michael Young on founding, sync, wsrp and ejb in marriage websites

2012-02-11T20:21:03Z

I finally spoke to Mike Young, founder, CTO and employee number 2. Unfortunately Mike had to leave early after last year's european symposium, so there I just got "the Brians" instead of the whole founder circle. This completes "the founders", though with Mike I'm more on the technical side. However. For those interested in the company history, there's still some things in there.

As you'll see and hear, Mike is the project lead for Liferay Sync which has just been released this week (1. February 2012) - check it out or listen to the earlier episodes where it was mentioned. (11 and 13)

Please refer to the Sync product home page or James' blog post announcing sync in order to see updates and current information on market positioning and licensing, which was not finalized when we spoke last December - so we didn't cover those topics then.

We talked about

how Mike first met Brian Chan
You might remember that Brian suggested Mike that he had to use EJB for his wedding website - here's the story behind that, and how it got him involved with Brian and Liferay in the end.
The parts of Liferay's code that Mike was involved in - starting with "everyone did everything"
Liferay Sync, OpenSocial and WSRP being the current areas of work
With Mike I finally found the project lead, responsible for lobbying for a Linux client for Sync and was able to rant on. He delivered a nice and understandable reasoning. Even though this means I'll have to wait, I guess I won't rant any more ;-)
The mentioned "not yet" released Sync product has actually been released this week
Mike is the initial implementor of the OpenSocial implementation in 2009 or 2010, but now handed it over to Dennis
I know Mike best for his involvement with WSRP, "Web Services for Remote Portlets" - we talk about what it is and what it takes to make this really compatible with other portals. There are quite some interpretations of this standard (and not only this) that need to be validated in the respective environments.
The aspects that eat into performance when you have two portals involved in answering your request - and what the implementors on both side can do to mitigate the drawbacks.
The nature of WSRP calls and how it all works on a very high level
The roadmap for OpenSocial and what we're planning to build on top of that for the next release (6.2)

And please remember to rate this podcast in your podcast directory of choice and provide feedback here on the episodes as well. Thank you.

Radio Liferay Episode 17: Jeffrey Handa on Training offerings

2012-01-28T18:51:19Z

Some listeners asked for an overview over the training courses that Liferay offers. Well - as I love feedback and try to do everything that gets suggested, I wanted to follow up on this suggestion. (This is a hint for all listeners: If there's something you're particularly interested in: There are good chances that I'm following up on that)

So I sat together with Jeffrey Handa, Senior Training Consultant and Project Manager at Liferay and we spoke about Liferay's training offers, the existing courses, the new offerings, what changes are planned for the next time etc..

We talked about

Jeff just had his 3rd birthray when we spoke, so he's in his fourth year now (I stole the term "birthray" from Julio ~~someone in the spanish office - can't remember who it was though, help me to get credit~~)
Jeff is one of the people with the "classic" way of joining Liferay - sorry, there's no interesting story here.
Jeff is involved in training: Preparing the material and actually teaching in trainings.
We're speaking about the training courses Liferay offers and Jeff gives some description of what the courses are about, also on the cooperation with liferay's knowledge management team. This includes the classic courses (PortalAdmin, PortalDeveloper, SystemAdmin) as well as the new courses (ThemeDevelopment and AdvancedPortalDeveloper)
some impressions of my (Olaf's) experience teaching portal admin training to customers that were using Liferay for some years already: They still got very good value out of it
What knowledge you should have before taking one of the new courses: "building a theme" and "advanced portal development"
Part of AdvancedPortalDevelopment is Writing Applications in webcontent. I have talked to Ray about this - he also has blogged about it.
Jeff is mentioning the ContentAdministrator course and the vision for what PortalAdmin can be about. Now I wonder if we will rename it to PortalNinja sooner or later.
Plans for what trainings will evolve to
What PortalAdminExpress is, when it is applicable
Trainings are available in several local languages as well.
Plans for certification and exams
Training is available on all supported EE versions - and public trainings will typically be held on the latest available EE version (but typically be released a bit after the EE release - if you expect the training to be on a specific version it pays to ask upfront. But we also speak about differences between the different versions, so that training is relevant for users of all versions of Liferay.