Introduction to Liferay, new features of version 6

Zsolt Berentey

Once upon a time

Platform Portal Application stack The application

More than a portal

Portals are best known by the concept of portlets Liferay has so much more by now

We have come a long way

2005 Liferay Portal 3.6.1 Drag & Drop portlet placement Runtime deployable themes Web-content (Journal Content) Nested Portlets 2006 Liferay Portal 4 Fine grained permissioning JSR-170 Full-page caching Page level themes

We have come a long way

2008 Liferay Portal 5 JSR-286 Dynamic tagging Sharepoint integration Control panel

Custom attributes Several other improvements to existing services

New in Liferay 6

Functional Improvements

Usability and Accessibility

Platform Improvements

Extensibility and Integration

Functional Improvements
Integrated Workflow Custom Attributes New Structure Editor Asset Publisher improvements Page Templates Web Site Templates Others like Social Equity, Teams, Inline permissions, Content sharing

Integrated Workflow
Allows assigning workflows to content creation for the main out-of-the-box portlets Configurable per organization or community Uses Kaleo, Liferays built-in workflow engine

Workflow API
Web Content
Document Library

Blogs

Message Boards
Your Portlet Workflow UI

Comments

Liferay Workflow Framework

Kaleo JBPM Others

Workflow API
Standardized API layer for external workflow engine integration JBPM already available Allows adding workflow functionality to your portlets

Simple Approval Workflow

Review

Creation Author

Approve?

Publication

Editor

Custom Attributes
I have no idea what SQL is but I would like to add searchable attributes to an users profile
Allows defining custom attributes to all entities within the portal No DB change is required UI is automatically generated Indexed and searchable

New Structure Editor

How do I change the structure of a web content without leaving the content editor? Drag and drop positioning of elements Integrated help through tooltips to guide the user The ability to changing the structure without leaving the content editor

Asset Publisher improvements

I need to filter contents by some tag or category. Asset publisher now displays any type of content Content can be filtered by:
Community or scope Specific content type Tags, categories

Filters can be combined in any way

Page Templates
Why do I have to create the same portlets for my pages all over again? Page templates allow the creation of preconfigured pages with one click Speeds up building web sites with many similar pages Eases the process of adding pages for non-technical users

Site Templates
Why do I have to add all these pages and portlets?!? Define a full set of pages with fully configured portlets and content Allows building full web sites with a click of a button Can be set at creation to public and/or private pages

Other improvements
Social Equity provides the ability to rate the participation of a user based on his activities Teams allow creating ad-hoc teams of users within communities or organizations Global scope enables sharing content across all communities and organizations Inline permissions allow smart querying the database to filter out results at the earliest. Applied out-of-the-box to document library and message boards.

Usability Improvements
New default theme Improved navigation and administration Face-lift and improved design for content portlets Web accessibility (WCAG 2.0)

New default design

Clearer design Table-less layout HTML 5 and XHTML 1.0 Much better base for new themes

Improved navigation and administration

Dock-bar simplified administration provides means to navigate across the pages of the portal Unified breadcrumb page hierarchy portlets navigation

Improved design of portlets

Portlets Document Library Image Gallery Message Boards etc.

Improvements Cleaner design Better layout of information

Web Accessibility
Adoption of W3Cs WCAG 2.0, which is compatible with web 2.0 technologies and dynamic web applications is getting adopted rapidly Usage of Alloy UI taglibs (also helps developers to create accessible content) Integration with CKEditor Aiming for AA rating

Platform Improvements
Performance Audit framework Reports generation Other improvements: scripting framework, sharding

Performance
From super fast speed To Ludicrous speed

Liferay 6 is 3 times faster than 5.2 Liferay 6 EE is 50% faster than CE

Audit Framework
Allows auditing any operation performed by the user Customizable through hook plugins Includes UI to query audit logs Available in EE versions

Reports Generation
Allows executing predefined reports based on the information of the database: e.g. growth of users number of content per type Allows scheduled execution Integrated with the de-facto standard engines: Jasper, BIRT (soon) EE version only

Scripting Frameworks
Allows users to extend the existing functionality by industry standard script languages Provides runtime execution of any of the main languages supported by the JVM: Groovy, Ruby, Python and JavaScript Out of the box: Administration Console Web Form: allows administrators to specify advanced validation patterns through Javascript

Sharding
Lets you distribute data and load across several databases automatically or manually Just for scalability Data isolation Can use different databases for different customers (data isolation)

Extensibility and Integration

Liferay Developer Studio (a.k.a Liferay IDE) Alloy UI framework Generic Asset Framework Other improvements

Liferay Development Studio

Allows creating several plugin types (hooks, layout templates, portlets, etc.) Includes application server management Supports deploying, redeploying and hot debugging Supports service builder Based on eclipse

Alloy UI Framework
Goal: increase productivity when building advanced UIs Allows encapsulating advanced UI components for reutilization Very flexible and configurable Specially prepared for portal environments Provide taglibs for creating accessible sites

Generic Asset Framework

You can add new types from plugins Provides services for custom asset types Asset renderers handle displaying

Other Improvements
New standards: CMIS, Atom Publishing Protocol Better integration for MS Office Improvements to tags and categories (including Tag Cloud) More flexibility to customize LDAP import and synchronization

Conclusions
Liferay 6 consolidates the evolution of Liferay during the last 10 years This version adds many useful new features based on customer and community feedback The platform is now faster, more robust, scalable and extensible. Support for standards as well as new useful technologies continues to be a priority

Thanks
zsolt.berentey@liferay.com

credits for images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robertrd/1842297294/