Introducing Liferay's New Community Ideation Initiative

Liferay, Inc., provider of the world's leading enterprise-class open source portal, announced today the launch of a new Ideation initiative designed to foster the development of new products and features for the Liferay Portal platform. The initiative is aimed to empower Liferay's worldwide community of users, customers and partners to better coordinate the technical resources and business requirements needed to develop new features for Liferay's products and create new apps that can be delivered through Liferay Marketplace, the company's public apps repository.

Liferay's new Ideation initiative includes the launch of a dynamic, easy-to-use dashboard of product and feature ideas and a more streamlined ideation process. In the new Ideas Dashboard, community members can quickly see the most popular feature requests, champion app ideas to the community, and get a direct feed of upcoming features for Liferay products. This allows Liferay community members to actively participate in setting the direction of Liferay's products and to discover new ideas to implement for their own projects.

The dashboard also serves as a springboard for those wanting to develop apps for Liferay Marketplace. Developers can find other community members to participate in defining and developing new apps, which may not be on the company's road map, and use the Marketplace to make their apps available to the public. Liferay initially launched the Marketplace with over 70 apps and themes developed internally, and is now accepting third-party apps from its partners and community members.

“We are proud to say that Liferay from the outset has enjoyed a close relationship with its talented and dedicated community, and together we have made significant gains in raising the profile of open source software among enterprises,” said James Falkner, Liferay's Community Manager. “We hope this effort will help us better gather and put into action the innovative ideas of our community while empowering individuals to add their own unique voices to the advancement of the Liferay platform.”

Many key features in today's Liferay Portal have originated from Liferay's community, which generates thousands of feature suggestions each year and now number more than 85,000 members. Examples include Faceted Search, which debuted in Liferay Portal 6.1, and features that are now fixtures in the portal platform such as Communities, Virtual Hosts, Translations and Control Panel. With this new initiative, community members have a new way to propose and promote ideas of their own.

To contribute ideas to the Liferay community, visit the dashboard at www.liferay.com/community/ideas.