Liferay Community Edition 6.1 released

5 mins

A new version of Liferay Community Edition has been released. Version 6.1 brings with it a huge list of new features. Here is a partial list from the release announcement posted on the Liferay website:

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, anonymous ratings, 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!