Liferay, frustrating to learn, but…

My experience with Liferay started in 2006 and has been an on-and-off relationship until very recent.  The portal management software is fantastic though, my learning of the product slowed more because I have a very limited understanding of Apache’s strut concept.  To customize the Liferay portals properly one has to have a good understanding of struts and I am just not experienced in that at all.

Liferay in itself though is a fantastic platform on which to develop portals, social platforms and even intranets.  I have had quite a bit of fun experimenting with it, and am confident it serves those purposes even better than any of the 20-odd CMS’s I have tested.  We’re implementing it at my largest client right now and I am keen to see how it performs and how it comes to mature under the larger team’s use.  Fortunately the team consists of more than just me so this little strut hiccup makes for a small issue really.  I’m going to have them look at how we can get into struts in a serious way, and then report back on Liferay in a fairer evaluation of its capabilities.  Keep watching this space to see of old dogs can learn new tricks 😉

Some source, some fruit and lots of spirit!

Since setting out in 2003/4 to find myself some alternatives to the rubbish that was being shipped with the notebooks I was buying for my business, I have come to appreciate that special breed of person who works damn hard to deliver a top notch product with like-minded people and then gives it away.  Though different licenses exist for free software products, and even more for open source products.

So since then I have used OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, the amazing Paint.net and Gimp, the fantastic Blender, Wings3D, and many more.  What I really love about these packages is the community support that exists.  I truly love the way the big brands try and convince consumers that open source is so bad for them because the support sucks.  Well, I have tried many paid product support services with varying degrees of frustrated responses, and can state emphatically that in 5 years of use, I have never missed the paid product support.  I have always found almost immediate assistance from forums online, or from actual support offered by the open source vendors themselves.  It has been a fantastic and solid experience in terms of satisfaction and reliability.

Now I have discovered much more in the open source and free software communities.  Software like digium’s brilliant Asterisk telephony platform (asterisk.org), Jason Cleeland and Carsten Schmitz’s highly regarded Limesurvey, OpenX’s market leading digital advertising platform, Joomla / Drupal / Vanilla and whatnot all CMS’s of excellent quality, Liferay the leading portal creation and management tool, OrangeHRM, the very well designed human resource management tool, and the CRM’s like Sugar and many others all set the trend for me for this new year, with a definite decision to focus all our efforts at New Ideas and my other projects to use open source, open source, open source.  Now take all this and base it on the premise that you have a near perfect platform onto which to roll out any of the above software, and you have the seeds of success for me right there.

The platform I am referring to is Ubuntu of course, and the greater Linux distro community too.  I realize there are still some small issues that requires modifications, mainly around drivers really, but for me the price comparison for the man in the street ($$$ vs zero) between Windows and Ubuntu just outweighs any such issues, especially after the sweetly designed 8.10 was released earlier this year.  What a magnificent platform!  So for me, the recipe is just perfect for success. You may find the experience the same. If not just add some fruit (limes and oranges work well), some source (open of course) and lots of community spirit (ubuntu)!