- Updated Support Matrix - Liferay's general policy is to update our support matrix for each release, testing Liferay against newer major releases of supporting operating systems, app servers, browsers, and databases (we reguarly update the bundled upstream open source libraries to fix bugs or take advantage of new features in the open source we depend on). For example, we are moving to Tomcat 7.x, MySQL 5.5.x, JBoss AS 7, Geronimo 2.2.1, and others.
- UI Refinements - Too numerous to list here. Many tasks that used to require a trip to Control Panel (thus losing your UI context) can now be done via the "Manage" menu. Document Libary has gotten a sweet overhaul. General improvements in snappiness.
- Sites - As described in Jorge's blog and now in the official documentation, the Sites concept has been introduced, decoupling a set of pages from an associated community or organization. This is one of the big conceptual changes in 6.1.
- Setup Wizard - To ease the first-time configuration of a portal (and its associated database), when starting a new instance of Liferay, the optional Setup Wizard will prompt for and configure these items for you. No more mucking about with
portal-ext.propertiesfor those basic configurations everyone wants to do initially. - Mobile Device Enhancements - For example, mobile device rules allow you to configure sets of rules and use those rules to alter the behavior of the portal based on the device being used to access Liferay. You can also access and evaluate rules through custom scripts.
- Social Activity Improvements - Many improvements to the social value system (formerly known as Social Equity). Check out the official documentation on what's new.
- Asset Publisher Improvements - The darling of the supplied out-of-box portlets, Asset Publisher can now do things like show and publish content from/to multiple scopes, better linking behavior for assets, and many more.
- Content Management Goodness - One of Liferay's core strengths is its simple yet powerful Web Content Management System. There have been many usability and functional improvements to it, including inline drag/drop structure editing, internationalized web content titles, preloading of structures on template creation, selection of default display pages, and more!
- Search Improvements - Lots of performance and accuracy improvements. Including users in search results.
This is just a partial list of new features. For a complete list of improvements, check out Liferay's announcement. Then, download the BitNami Liferay native installer or virtual appliance, or deploy Liferay to the Amazon Cloud (AWS) with the BitNami Liferay AMI. Enjoy!
Please note that there is a known issue in the welcome page where the Liferay application does not display some of the images. We are working with Liferay to correct this and will post an update as soon as it is available, but it should not otherwise affect the application. There is also a known issue with Java on micro instances in the AWS Cloud that causes rebooted instances to hang. This issue is out of our control but has been reported to Amazon.