Radio Liferay

It's my return guest show time - here's another one. However, you've unfortunately never heard my first recording with Juan Gonzalez, back when we did it. This was due to a glitch that I'm really sorry for. Juan holds the Community Contributor Award 2012 and has since joined the spanish office of Liferay, working mainly in support and in the Liferay Faces team. As we missed doing so in the recording - we'd like to have a shout out to all the support staff in/for Liferay. These are the guys that keep the system running and the customers happy, but rarely receive some of the glamour of standing in the spotlight. (More notes and links available in HTML version of this paragraph and in the blogpost linked to the episode)

Please welcome yet another return guest, Milen Dyankov, a fellow trainer and senior consultant in Liferay. Milen has been participating in episode 9 and he has been the original contributor of the mobile device detection code to Liferay. Back then he was a community member, but in the mean time he as joined the team and is now working from Poland and all over (and around) the european continent. (More notes and links available in HTML version of this paragraph and in the blogpost linked to the episode)

Please welcome a return guest, James Falkner, Liferay's Community manager. I got him on to talk about the changes in the upcoming symposium's structure, but we continued with conversations about a lot of topics he also mentioned in his previous Community Roundup as well as a brave move that I'd like to tease here: He gives us the definitive release date for Liferay 6.2 - so remember: you've heard it first on Radio Liferay (More notes and links available in HTML version of this paragraph and in the blogpost linked to the episode)

I took some time to speak to Jorge Ferrer, Liferay's VP of Engineering about all things Engineering and Development in Liferay. This time I'm not starting with butchering names, but positions. Jorge is one of the very early contributors to Liferay, started as community member and got hired, started the spanish office. After an episode "on the dark side", being the GM for Spain, he's back in engineering. We're talking about his responsibilities within the project, the company, and more. (More notes and links available in HTML version of this paragraph and in the blogpost linked to the episode)

At this year's Jax I met Ville Ingmann, "Your Business Buddy" at Vaadin (the business card says "VP of German Operations"). With some inadvertent background noise (sorry) we talk about the history of Vaadin in Liferay, the meaning of the name, which also explains the logo, and the integration of Vaadin in Liferay (Vaadin is technology partner of Liferay, the library comes bundled with your Liferay installation and is available in the "New Project" wizard of Liferay IDE). (More notes and links available in HTML version of this paragraph and in the blogpost linked to the episode)

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 (with Liferay since 2007/8) and Zeno Rocha (Sep 2012) volunteered. (Eduardo was mentioned already in episode 3 with Nate Cavanaugh, Zeno has joined Liferay since then. Both of them are members of the brazilian team.) We start with their history and * Zeno's project jquery boilerplate. He's also one of the founders of the Brazil JS foundation * Rosetta Stone, no longer hidden but very prominent on the website, comparing jQuery, YUI, AlloyUI * The traumatic transition time in 2010 between Liferay 5.2 and 6.0, when AlloyUI replaced jQuery * How Zeno got assimilated into Liferay * The new website for AlloyUI with Tutorials, Examples and Documentation (alloyui.com) * What's new in AlloyUI 2.0, when will it come into Liferay? * Feedback from the community (portuguese video on youtube) * Can I run different versions of Y

This is another episode recorded at the European Symposium 2012 in Wiesbaden. Zsolt Balogh, head of Liferay's Support for the EMEA reason talks about the pain points that led to developing a custom issuetracker and support management system. Enterprise customers know what he's talking about: Liferay is using LESA to handle support issues, fix and escalate them. To follow the visual part of the presentation, please go to the symposium's download page Zsolt starts by laying out why Jira was fine for a single project (and it continues to be in use at issues.liferay.com), but not so much for the way we're supporting the enterprise customers. After introducing the problem space, he's going through implementation timeline, migration, features and requirements, as well as later evolution of the system (naturally, LESA is still being actively developed and extended). Also, there are lots of metrics and how they are helping to improve service or efficiency growing the team. You'll learn how Liferay's support teams

New year's resolution: Publish more podcast episodes. Let's start - Happy New Year, wishing you all the best for 2013... This is a solo episode with yours truly. I had a lot of fun preparing and presenting this session, "Well Hidden Features", at the european symposium 2012 in Wiesbaden/Germany, as well as in Milano. They both built upon earlier presentations at the nordic and french symposiums and have been used as inspirations for other presentations at the north american as well as the spanish symposium. So, if you were at any of these symposiums, there's a good chance that you've heard some of the content. Also, if you're working with Liferay for some time, there's another good chance for you to know some of the tipps&tricks already. As I mention at the beginning of the recording: This all is trivial knowledge - but in order to be trivial knowledge, it first has to be known - and I hope there's something in it even for the more experienced among you.

Yes, I know. I didn't keep my previous promise to quickly follow up with the next episode. Thus, I'm not promising again, only revealing that I'm planning to be quicker in future. podcast-logoThis is another episode recorded at the previous Liferay Retreat. I sat together with Samuel Kong, GM of the chinese office and member of Liferay's security team. As I've been carrying this recording around for quite some while, note that there have been some changes during the last year. First and foremost, we have a new community security team, which was not around at the time of the recording. I'm planning to talk to someone from that team soon (consider yourself warned if you're on that team) Some of the topics you'll find in this episode How to file a security issue - thankfully he is consistent with what Cynthia and Michael have reported: go to issues.liferay.com, file your issue under the component "security", optionally with private visibility. If you've already done so, please try if your issue is reprod

My apologies for the long break in publishing the episodes - I got distracted with a lot of work and once there is an interruption of a habit, you probably know how hard it is to get back into it. I hope to be on track again now and will publish the archive of already recorded episodes soon - and produce more of them. This is another episode recorded at the previous Liferay Retreat. I sat together with Jim Hinkey, Knowledge Engineer and part of Liferay's knowledgement and documentation team, since March 2011. He took over ownership of the developer's guide and is the guy to bring back javadoc to Liferay (more about this and how/why Liferay once lost its javadoc at the end of this episode) We talked about How Jim found Liferay Life in Raleigh/NC One of his biggest chokes, the (re)creation of javadocs for Liferay The process that Javadoc now has to go through in order to get into the product and other topics As I managed to get short hold of Brian Chan, I had the opportunity to ask two m

This is another celebrity show. I sat together with one of the well known faces of Liferay, giving a voice to it: You might know Bruno Farache better as his Alter Ego, Bruno Admin. If you ever installed Liferay CE, you probably know at least his portrait image which is the administrator's face greeting you on the default homepage and the one that you impersonate in order to make your first administrative steps. We talked about * Bruno started 2007 with a Liferay Training in L.A. * founded the office as General Manager in Recife, Brazil in 2009 * his experience with dressing up in the L.A. office * starting at Liferay (with the office rented from a church) meant that Bruno could tell his mother that he went to church every day * how he became Bruno Admin, seemingly taking the role from Julio, and what this means for attending a gym * Instead of handing out autographs, he got his own "flair", a pin that was handed out at the annual retreat for everybody who knew the password. Check out how m

In this episode I spoke with Juan Fernandez, starting with an embarrassing nonpronouciation of his family name. Juan is a Liferay core engineer in the spanish office, working mainly in the WCM parts of Liferay, also doing training. We talked about * how Juan started with the task to integrate Liferay with Pentaho, becoming a community member and later joining the spanish office * How Consulting findings are fed back into the product and what Juan did for the internationalization and localization of content in 6.1, default data for structures, related content, etc. (lots of new features for version 6.1 here) * Juan's demo at the european symposium and what he did when he created a basic application within the WCM system * If you have already implemented new custom Assets you don't need to do anything to get "related assets" functionality * the spanish community, contributing features, plugins or other add ons, taking the examples of Jack Rider of xmlportletfactory fame, Aritz Galdos of Lifedr

I finally spoke to Mike Young, founder, CTO and employee number 2. Unfortunately Mike had to leave early after last year's european symposium, so there I just got "the Brians" instead of the whole founder circle. This completes "the founders", though with Mike I'm more on the technical side. However. For those interested in the company history, there's still some things in there. As you'll see and hear, Mike is the project lead for Liferay Sync which has just been released this week (1. February 2012) - check it out or listen to the earlier episodes where it was mentioned. (11 and 13) Please refer to the Sync product home page or James' blog post announcing sync in order to see updates and current information on market positioning and licensing, which was not finalized when we spoke last December - so we didn't cover those topics then. We talked about * how Mike first met Brian Chan * You might remember that Brian suggested Mike that he had to use EJB for his wedding website - here's the story beh

Some listeners asked for an overview over the training courses that Liferay offers. Well - as I love feedback and try to do everything that gets suggested, I wanted to follow up on this suggestion. (This is a hint for all listeners: If there's something you're particularly interested in: There are good chances that I'm following up on that) So I sat together with Jeffrey Handa, Senior Training Consultant and Project Manager at Liferay and we spoke about Liferay's training offers, the existing courses, the new offerings, what changes are planned for the next time etc.. We talked about * Jeff just had his 3rd birthray when we spoke, so he's in his fourth year now (I stole the term "birthray" from someone in the spanish office - can't remember who it was though, help me to get credit) * Jeff is one of the people with the "classic" way of joining Liferay - sorry, there's no interesting story here. * Jeff is involved in training: Preparing the material and actually teaching in trainings. * We're

Having been raised the way (and time) I have been, I was particularly interested in one project that Liferay is involved in. So I took the opportunity and spoke with Nathan Shaw, Principal Consultant at Liferay, about one of Liferay's (literally) most colorful clients, who luckily has has agreed to be a topic in this podcast. With this, you get an impression of how a highly visible and intense project is structured and what's happening behind the scene. And you'll see a site that doesn't really look like your classic portal. Who am I talking about? Sesame Workshop. We talked about * what your kids think of your work when you're always looking at the Sesame Street while pretending to work. * how Sesame frequently releases new content to the site - having fresh content and topics every so often is quite a task for the editorial team. * Big parts of what have been custom for Sesame geting into the product now (in 6.1), namely staging, versioning and branching (improved from the version 6.0 implemen

For the annual Liferay Retreat, I was in L.A. again and took the opportunity to record several new episodes - this one as a nice fireside chat - the first one with a live audience, though they have not been interacting too much - just been in the same room :) In this session I talked with Greg Amerson, the author of Liferay's development tooling. This is one of the first recordings on new gear, unfortunately levelling was not ideal, so it had to significantly be amplified and denoised - bringing some drawbacks in audio quality, mainly noise despite the denoising, but you'll be able to stand it - promised. Also, I hoped to get this out before the holiday season, unfortunately this didn't work out that well for various reasons - Sorry for that, you'll get your late christmas wishes in this episode. Among other topics we talked about: * Greg got his exposure to Eclipse Tooling from being one of the first people to work on the MyEclipse product * The distincion between Liferay IDE (for Liferay CE) and

For the annual Liferay Retreat, I was in L.A. again and took the opportunity to record several new episodes - this one as the first OpenAir recording. This also marks the advent of my new recording gear - expected to raise audio quality quite a bit. In this session I talked with Bradley Wood. Brad is Frontend developer - involved in all things theme, CSS, Velocity. And he's maintaining a nice tumblelog with all kinds of Frontend tipps & tricks for Liferay (which brought him on my radar for the podcast). Among other topics we talked about: * Getting theme custom settings (e.g. color picker) through the API - now standardized and extended due to popular demand * How Sass add power to CSS with variables (integrated in Liferay 6.1) * Compass, a library of Sass functions with vendor specific CSS3 * Brad's style for creating a new theme, starting from photoshop, through CSS and Velocity * Parts of adopting a Look&Feel might involve hooks to change the core Liferay JSPs * Using str

For this episode I talked to Dennis Ju, Softwareengineer at Liferay Inc. Among other topics, Dennis is involved with Liferay Sync, together with Gail Hernandez and also with the OpenSocial implementation and Liferay foundation though we didn't talk about the foundation.. Among other topics we talked about * Frontends for Sync, (Sync was first mentioned in Episode 11 by Alex and Sergio) * The (currently) missing OS support for Windows ME and Linux and which one will be supported first (most likely) * Mobile Clients, Desktop Clients * Sync uses JSON Webservices * OpenSocial * Various presentations on OpenSocial on ECS, WCS, EuCS * OpenSocial on Liferay LIVE in January 2011

Liferay for your ears - I had the opportunity to record a session with 3/4 of the founders, namely all the Brians (simplifying the "y" in Bryan to "i" for this pluralization): Brian Chan (Chief Software Architect), Brian Kim (Chief Operating Officer), Bryan Cheung (Chief Executive Officer). Some of the topics we talked about: * How they met and started to work despite different music and food taste * How or if college grades (might) relate to real life * While they used to live on the same floor some time, now they are still on the same planet... * Crazy organic growth and the hardest year, Rooming arrangements and sacrifices during the startup phase * The honorary Brian (the fourth founder, who could not join the recording), Mike Young, and why he should use EJBs for his marriage, what risk he took * How Caris put up with Brian's activity after 10pm and got Liferay's invoices off of notepad * The long term plans, "no exit" strategy and how a business can help to do good * And at the

Liferay for your ears - This time I sat together with Alexander Chow and Sergio González. Both are Liferay Core Engineers. Alex is "Employee number 8, UK employee number 1 (which gives away his location) and Liferay-Mac-User number 1. Sergio is Spain's employee number 6. Both have extensively cooperated in the new Document Library for Liferay 6.1 - now called Media Library - and this provides the main topic for us to talk about: My shownotes: * Their background and what they worked on in Liferay * How to pronounce names * Naturally: The work both did on Document/Media Library and related portlets through the last year: The document library got a good rewrite, Ajax-based UI and a new backend to use Liferay as entry-point into other external repository systems. * CMIS (short for Content Management Interoperability Something - see link) * A lot of the document library backend war developed with JUnit and worked within a few days of work with the independently created UI when they were firs