Liferay Puts Open Source Community In the Driving Seat with New Tools and Developer Relations Team

Liferay, Inc., which makes digital experience software for enterprises, today announced a new initiative intended to reinvent the Liferay open source community experience to better support its growing international needs.

Liferay has introduced a dedicated Liferay Developer Relations team, a new Liferay Community website and a new Liferay Community instant-chat vehicle to make it easier for the open source community to engage. This latest initiative is intended to provide a high quality community experience that supports and inspires members to engage with one another, helping them to build their applications and to collaborate on open source projects both locally and internationally.

“The Liferay Community belongs to its members, and will always be exactly as healthy and vibrant as its members make it – that’s who it exists for,” said Bryan Cheung, CEO, Liferay. “That said, Liferay has the responsibility – and opportunity – to ensure that all community members are empowered to have their needs met and are able to share their ideas efficiently and effectively to achieve ever greater success with their applications.

“As the communities built around these projects mature, we as a business recognize the importance of transitioning away from directing community efforts and towards facilitating engagement. Doing so places developers at the helm and enables the Community to grow in directions that it self-determines.”

Liferay Developer Relations Team

Liferay has created a dedicated Developer Relations team who have the remit to inspire, educate, assist and encourage Liferay’s community of developers in their collective efforts to make innovative applications using Liferay open source technology. This multi-national team, which comprises individuals well-known within the Liferay community, also plays an important role helping members raise ideas and concerns with Liferay-employed engineers, with the ultimate result of improving projects for everyone’s mutual benefit.

“Building the team was no easy task,” said Zeno Rocha, Principal Developer Relations Advocate, Liferay. “We needed people who were technical and could empathise with developer’s pain points, so they could listen, and — most importantly — take action. We are confident we have found individuals who can relate to these problems and also tell the story behind the tech to inspire others, and now they are working hard to help the Community succeed in their projects.”

New Liferay Community Site

Previously, each of the dozen-plus independently developed Liferay open source projects had its own website, resulting in a disjointed experience for community members. To address this, Liferay has now introduced a central site at community.liferay.com that is designed to enable each project team to continue evolving its specifically tailored web presence, while also providing a unified experience for the Community as a whole.

The new site has been designed to offer a more inviting, modern and functional space. It enables developers to discover, understand, and utilize and collaborate on the full family of Liferay-supported open source projects and related services and software from the core Liferay CE portal software to its native mobile development and file sharing tools, UI and software development tools and related services.

Liferay Community Chat

Until now, community members have had two platforms for communication, with technical questions discussed on the Liferay Forums and extensive technical posts available via community blog posts. Now, to equip developers with a much more instant channel for communication, Liferay has introduced new Slack-powered chat functionality for the Liferay Community. The platform includes designated channels for each Liferay project and user group, making it simple for members to chat in their own languages and coordinate meetups across the community.

The Developer Relations team is starting to see the impacts of its latest initiative. In less than one month, 296 people have added Community Chat to their working environment, and a total of 6,494 messages have been sent. Of these, 46% were direct messages, which suggests people not only have a place to share and discuss ideas in public, but are also creating meaningful relationships in private.

Readers can find out more about the Liferay Community and its free open source projects for content management, mobile app development and enterprise file sharing at https://community.liferay.com