Bradley Wood's Liferay Tips

At this year’s Jax I met

I would like to bring attention to a hot topic around the Liferay offices lately, and one that you should definitely consider for the websites that you are working on: behavioral analytics. I’d like via Staff

Introduction By following a few, simple rules we can guarantee that Liferay can upgrade from any previous version to any newer version. We can see this in thefollowing example. We are going to change via Staff

I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of the print edition of Using Liferay Portal 6.1! For those of you on your toes (and you know who you are), it’s actually been available since via Staff

We are pleased to announce that Sync Mobile 2.0 has been released!

Over the past several years, our North American Sales and Customer Experience Management team has grown at a tremendous rate. We have team members in New York, Illinois, California, Minnesota, Texas via Staff

In Liferay we are engaged in redefining some UX concepts, and this has allowed us to experience at first hand, the controversy that is still latent, between the fundamental languages (image and via Staff

En Liferay nos encontramos inmersos en la redefinición de algunos conceptos UX, y ello nos ha permitido comprobar de primera mano, la controversia que aún se mantiene latente, entre los lenguajes via Staff

Hi all, I’ll share with you our latest progress made with supporting OAuth authorized requests. I’ll make example with android application since I’m familiar with it (enough to display button). OAuth via Staff

As a preview for AlloyUI was just released (together with the new website) I took the opportunity to have another episode about the UI layer. Luckily two members of the core team, Eduardo Lundgren via Staff

As a preview for AlloyUI was just released (together with the new website) I took the opportunity to have another episode about the UI layer. Luckily two members of the core team, Eduardo Lundgren via Staff

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I am very excited to announce that as of today, all Liferay community members can now create and maintain their own blogs on liferay.com! Wooo!! This was announced near the end of the A Day of Liferay, and has been on the TODO list for a while. The problem has always been how to maintain the quality of content on liferay.com, as blogs are generally considered to be a more reliable source of information about Liferay, and are generally expected to be of higher quality than your typical stream-of-conciousness found in other publishing areas like the community forums.

Blog Streams

Every community member’s blog is maintained in their Profile (more on this later). What follows is a description of how all of our blog posts are aggregated and visualized on the community site:

The first important point is that we will start with two separate (visually) blog streams - the Staff Blog and the Community Blog. As you guessed, the Community Blog is for topics by and for the community. Anyone can post here, including Liferay staffers, and will do so more often than not. The Staff Blog is for posts by Liferay staffers that may have a more general target audience than just our community. As an example, Ray Auge would post his most recent work on OSGi to the Community Blog. Caris Chan would likely post her blog about Liferay’s new offices in France to the Staff Blog.

There are three areas where these streams are evident:

1. On the Community Dashboard - “Recent Bloggers” remains on the dashboard, but each post is further decorated with a gray Staff tag for Liferay staffers, and each post is categorized according to which stream it appears in.
2. On the Community Bloggers Page - Each stream is separately shown. In addition, a list of individual bloggers appears on the right, for bloggers both on and off of liferay.com, sorted by total number of posts, with Liferay staffers receiving the Staff tag. If you maintain an external blog centered around Liferay and wish to have it listed, fill out the form!
3. On an individual blog post - The stream in which the post appears is tagged, along with a tag for Liferay staffers.

Creating your Blog

At Liferay, we drink our own champagne, so you’ll be using the Liferay Blogs Portlet to enter your blogs.

To start off, we are going to ask that if you wish to blog that you manually request it. We will never refuse to enable blogging for anyone (unless you don’t appear to be a human), but do not want a flood of spammy posts clogging up the system. To get things started, we have enabled blogging for the vast majority of you already (over 500 community members), that have done even a very small amount of activity in the last 12 months, so chances are it’s already turned on for you. So go check your profile to see if you have a Blog link, before requesting it, by checking if you have the “Blog” link on your liferay.com profile.

To create a new blog, navigate to Places -> User Profile:

you will land on your personal (private) “Home” page.  Next, click Profile:

and then click Blog (if you do not see a Blog link, request to get upgraded!):

To add a new blog entry, click on (yep, you guessed it):  You will be presented with a WYSIWYG editor in which to enter content. Each post is sanitized to remove potentially dangerous content that clever folks might try to enter via the “source” mode, such as javascript, IFrames to other sites (however, embedded gists are allowed!), and other questionable CSS tricks.

You can save your blog as a Draft, and come back later to work on it, or just click Publish to publish!  Once you publish, your post should immediately appear in the Community Stream as described above. You can always come back and edit your entries, or delete them if you wish.

External Blogs

I know that many of you actively maintain your own blog off of liferay.com. If you wish to have your blog listed on the Community Blogs page, you can also request this via the external blog listing request page. That list is constructed by looking at the top 50 liferay.com bloggers (ranked by # of posts), and then external blogs are randomly inserted.

Tips and Tricks

• You can include uploaded images in your blogs by clicking the Image button, and uploading to your personal space on liferay.com.
• You can use certain CSS classes like callout to make images have rounded corners and shadows, etc. Go look at old blogs and use your favorite web page inspector to discover items.
• You can include gists (code snippets) using the ‘Embed’ option, and cutting/pasting the necessary javascript. This is the only kind of js allowed in your blog.

Blogger Policies

Blogging has been around forever, as have the written and unwritten rules, so this should not be new to any of you. Here are some of the written rules:

• Be courtous and respectful. Don’t use foul language, don’t be mean, don’t disrespect, don’t hate, don’t pre-judge, etc.
• Don’t post advertisements for your business or post job offers.
• Check your syntax and spelling. No one will take u srsly if u write like a txt msg to your bf.
• Don’t use your blog to post questions about Liferay that belong in the forums, unless you already have an answer and wish to educate. Blogs are for well-formed thoughts about a particular subject, not for getting help connecting Liferay to your corporate LDAP server.
• Cite your sources, don’t use copyrighted content without permission, give credit where credit is due.
• Be sure to read and respond to follow-up comments.
• If you have not yet added a profile picture, please do so before blogging. Seeing a list of anonymous faces in the blog stream is just sad :)
• No tricks! (Such as continuously updating your entry’s Display Date so that your blog is always at the top of the list)

There are more, and I’m sure I left a few out. I really hope this can be a great, free, open resource for all of us, so please play nice :) All blogs and posts are subject to deletion and with no warning if you violate these rules, but you’ll probably get a warning first.

Have fun, I know it’s been a long time coming, and I can’t wait to see what kinds of interesting posts our community has in store!

Acknowledgements

Giving credit where credit is due! Amos Fong led the implementation team, and David Miyabe did the design. I acted as Chief Pestering Officer on behalf of our community.

Earlier this week we wrapped up A Day of Liferay - a 24 hour epic  trip around the globe to meet our amazing community and get to know more about their interests and work they do on and around Liferay and other open source projects. I want to personally thank everyone who took time out of their day to participate - it was great to see the diversity of people we have in our little corner of open source, and hear about what they’re up to! I had a lot of fun doing it, and learned a lot, and hope you did to!

On the A Day of Liferay page, I have added a complete index of links for each of the significant parts of the broadcast (or you can spend the next 24 hours watching the broadcast in its entirety :) ).

Also, for those that won stuff (shirts, pi’s, etc). Rest assured you will be notified next week to arrange for you to recieve your hard-earned prizes! Now, where’s my 10 million-gram mega-sugary Cachaça? 

I wanted to let you know that I plan on talking about the resources importer and some new features added.

Join me at 6:00pm PST