Liferay 6.2.0 GA1 is out! and already available in BitNami

Last weekend Liferay 6.2.0 GA1 was released. This is the first stable release for 6.2.0.

This release includes important UI improvements with a much more modern look. It also includes a lot of improvements to the backend and user experience of both staging and the export/import functionalities. You will also find changes in the main Control Panel.

A full list of fixes included in this release can be found in the official release notes. To experience first-hand these feaures, you can use Bitnami to deploy Liferay 6.2.0 with the click of a button. Our demo servers are free and available for an hour.

For production and permanent deployments BitNami Liferay is also available as free, ready to run native installers, virtual machines and Azure and Amazon EC2 images. We provide management, monitoring, backups and additional features for Liferay hosting in BitNami Cloud Hosting for both community and enterprise Liferay editions.

Deploy Your Favorite BitNami Apps to VMware vFabric Application Director

We have partnered with VMware to bring your favorite BitNami apps to VMware vFabric Application Director! You can now find free application blueprints for SugarCRM, JasperReports Server, Drupal, Joomla!, Liferay and other applications in the new VMware Cloud Applications Management Marketplace, which was launched today.

vFabric Application Director is designed to simplify the multi-tier deployment of applications by providing a drag and drop interface that lets you visually build application deployments. In collaboration with VMware, we  have prepared both application components and deployment blueprints for many of the top BitNami applications. This means that you can point and click your way to deploying SugarCRM, Alfresco, Liferay and other apps in multi-tier configurations on VMware vCloud-powered private, public and hybrid clouds in a few mouse clicks. We are particularly excited about this announcement because it is the first time we are providing a way to deploy BitNami applications in a multi-tiered architecture. 

Currently available applications are listed below. Click on an icon for a how to for deploying the app on vFabric. 

Enjoy!

Learn How to Run Liferay in the Cloud

Last week, we put on a joint webcast with Liferay on running Liferay in the cloud, which is now available online. During the presentation, we cover the benefits of running Liferay in the cloud as well as some of the pitfalls to watch out for. We then discuss cloud deployment options and show you how to deploy Liferay to the cloud with BitNami Cloud Hosting.

Learn more and sign up for BitNami Cloud Hosting on our Liferay in the cloud page.

Free Webcast: Running Liferay in the Cloud with BitNami

Last week, we announced that Liferay Enterprise Edition is now available in BitNami Cloud Hosting. Liferay is a complete, Java-based portal platform. It can be used as a web content management system, an integration platform, a collaboration platform, a social application platform or any combination thereof. 

Next week, we will be presenting a joint webcast with Liferay to discuss the benefits of running Liferay in the cloud and show you how to deploy your own Liferay server with BitNami. Here are the details:

Running Liferay in the Cloud

Summary:   Everyone is talking about the cloud, but does running Liferay in the cloud make sense for your business? In this webinar, we will cover the benefits of running Liferay in the cloud as well as some of the pitfalls to watch out for. We will then discuss your options for cloud deployments and show you how to deploy Liferay to the cloud with BitNami Cloud Hosting. While this presentation will aim to provide you with the knowledge you need to decide whether or not running in Liferay in the cloud is the best option for you, we will also discuss some of the more technical aspects of deploying Liferay, as well as some sizing recommendations in terms of what setup will work best for your needs.

When: Wednesday, November 7, 2012 10:00 AM Pacific

Even if you aren't available to attend at that time, sign up! We will send you a link to view the recorded webcast at your convenience.

If you are interested in learning more about running Liferay in the cloud, you may also want to download our free whitepaper.

Run Liferay Enterprise Edition in the Cloud with BitNami

We are happy to announce that you can now run Liferay Enterprise Edition in the cloud with BitNami! We have partnered with Liferay to provide one click deployment and simplified management of the enterprise portal on the Amazon Cloud with BitNami Cloud Hosting.

If you are not familiar with it, Liferay is a complete, Java-based portal platform. It can be used as a web content management system, an integration platform, a collaboration platform, a social application platform or any combination thereof. Liferay customers range from federal agencies and major investment banks to media and branding-rich organizations like Sesame Street.

BitNami Cloud Hosting is a platform that simplifies the deployment and management of web applications in the cloud. It provides one-click application deployment, automatic incremental backups, resizing, server scheduling, monitoring, cloning and other features that enable businesses to deploy and manage applications in the cloud. Now that Liferay is included in the BitNami Cloud Hosting library, you can have a complete Liferay platform up and running in the cloud in minutes. Snapshot functionality makes it easy to make copies of production servers to test upgrades before deploying them or to develop new features separate from the production environment. 

To learn more, download our free joint whitepaper, "Running Liferay in the Cloud with BitNami".

You can sign up for BitNami Cloud Hosting at: http://bitnami.org/cloud and for a free trial of Liferay Enterprise at: http://www.liferay.com/bitnami-trial

BitNami Makes it Easy to Try Infoworld's BOSSIE-Award Winning Apps

At BitNami, we carefully select what we believe to be the best open source applications across a range of categories, so you know that any app that you get from BitNami will be of the highest quality. It seems that Infoworld agrees with our selections - out of 25 applications selected for the 2012 Infoworld Bossie Awards (Best of Open Source Software,) 10 are available on BitNami and an 11th is already in the works!

We would like to congratulate the teams building the following BitNami-packaged applications for earning Bossie Awards:

• WordPress
• Joomla!
• Drupal
• Typo3
• Alfresco
• Gallery
• SugarCRM
• Magento
• Spree
• Liferay

As with all BitNami Stacks, all of the above applications are available free of charge as native installers, virtual appliances (VMs) and AMIs for the Amazon Cloud. In particular, the VMs and AMIs make it incredibly easy to test these best-of-breed applications in minutes without actually installing them in your system. Even if you choose to use the native installers, you will see that they are completely self-contained and install all of their dependencies in their own directory, so they won't interfere with other software installed on your system.

Do you agree with Infoworld's list? If you think there is a great open source business application that isn't available in the BitNami library, let us know in the comments.

Join Us at the Liferay Symposium in San Francisco

Liferay, a leading open source portal, web content management and collaboration software package, is a popular application in the BitNami library and we are happy to announce that we will be participating in the upcoming Liferay Symposium on October 8th and 9th in San Francisco. If you are using Liferay or looking for a new portal solution, the Liferay Symposium provides a great opportunity to hear from industry leaders as well as learn about Liferay and get to know others in the community. Unlike many tech conferences, a complete track is dedicated to case studies, so there will be plenty of information on how people are using Liferay in the real world. One of those sessions will be led by BitNami CEO Erica Brescia, who will present on whether or not running Liferay in the cloud is right for you.

View the complete agenda and register now to make sure that you get a spot! We do have a handful of FREE passes available for BitNami users who are running Liferay. If you are interested in a free pass, send an email to info at bitnami and we will let you know if we have any more available.

To get a free installer or virtual appliance or to deploy Liferay to the cloud, visit the BitNami Liferay Stack page. We hope to see you at the conference!

Cloud Hosting for Liferay from BitNami

Liferay is now available in BitNami Cloud Hosting! Liferay is the newest application to join the growing list of apps in BitNami Cloud Hosting, which provides one-click deployment of dozens of open source applications and development environments to the Amazon Cloud (AWS). Liferay is an open source portal, web content and collaboration software platform that powers internal and external websites for some of the world's largest companies, such as Cisco, T-Mobile, Barclays Bank, Autozone, China Mobile and many others.

Liferay in BitNami Cloud Hosting

For Liferay users, BitNami Cloud Hosting provides the easiest way to host Liferay in the cloud. In addition to simplified application deployment, BitNami Cloud Hosting provides automatic backups, backup retention policies, server scheduling, monitoring and other features that simplify the hosting of apps on AWS.

We offer a free unlimited 30-day trial of BitNami Cloud Hosting as well as a free developer plan, which allows you to launch and manage one micro instance free for one year. Combining this with Amazon's free tier provides you with a free year of hosting for a cloud server! Sign up for a free trial to have Liferay up and running on the Amazon Cloud in minutes.

BitNami Liferay 6.1 Stack Now Available

Last Friday, v6.1 of the Liferay open source enterprise portal was released. We're pleased to announce that the BitNami Liferay Stack has been updated to include this new release, which includes the following features (taken from the Liferay website):

• 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 withportal-ext.properties for 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.