Liferay announces the availability of Alloy UI, Liferay Live and the “Design with Liferay” program

Liferay, Inc., today debuted at the company’s East Coast Symposium event in Reston, VA, three new advancements for web developers and the Liferay community; Liferay Alloy UI, Liferay Live and a new program labeled “Design with Liferay” targeted at the extensive set of portal customers worldwide facing the end of feature life for their current platform.

With massive consolidation in the portal market in recent years, and several products effectively facing an end-of-feature-life phase, many customers are looking for a strategy to smartly transition to Liferay Portal.  Liferay’s excellent community (now over 28,000 people), innovative features and lightweight aspects provide the best option for these customers.  In response, Liferay today launched the “Design with Liferay” program, to support these business and technical managers faced with transition.  As part of the program, Liferay will provide for a limited time a “First Year Free” program to help business leaders in their transition plans plus is making available a transition workshop to help managers develop a successful plan of action.

“Liferay Portal is well loved in enterprises worldwide, but customers need a safe and cost effective plan to transition from their older platforms.”, said Paul Hinz, Liferay’s Chief Marketing Officer. “While customers could choose to pay for a support contract after a product enters feature end of life, implementations using this software become stagnant and the technical people and skills used to maintain deployments cannot be used elsewhere.  With the support of Liferay partners and the Design with Liferay program, this is a great time to transition to Liferay.”

Liferay also announced today Liferay Live, an innovative offer for Liferay community members and customers to grow their skills in Liferay.  The collaborative web-casting site will be used to provide the community both business and technical presentations on Liferay and partner technologies.

Additionally, as part of the Design with Liferay program, Liferay is announcing the immediate availability of Liferay Alloy UI.  Built in collaboration with Yahoo’s YUI project, Alloy UI provides a concise set of widgets used to develop portlets, portal pages or stand-alone web applications and web content.  Alloy UI is a UI meta-framework that provides a consistent and simple API for building web applications across all three levels of the browser: structure, style and behavior.   Liferay Alloy UI does not require a portal but can be used for any web application and when used with Liferay Portal, expands the simplicity and capabilities of an enterprise portal application.  Liferay Alloy UI allows customers looking to transition to Liferay from older platforms both a way to simplify the transition as well as allow designers to make the new deployment more feature rich ensuring the new services are more than the old.

“Alloy UI represents a new capability for web developers to simplify the development of rich UI’s,”said Brian Chan, Liferay Portal’s creator and Chief Software Architect. “We are happy to have worked on this with the Yahoo team and feel it will be a great benefit to the Liferay Community.”

For more information, please visit www.liferay.com.