A few weeks ago I went to the Liferay Developer Conference in Darmstadt. Needless to say there were many new features of Liferay 7 presented and lot's of exciting stuff happened at the conference.
You can read about the highlights in the blogposts of Olaf Kock and James Falkner.
It was already the 3rd year in a row that I attended the conference and as always it has given me a motivational boost. So, I made a list for myself about the actions I want to take after the conference and I'd like to share this with you:
- Participate more in the forums. I've been trying to do that for a while already, but it's not always easy when working full time as a consultant. But James Falkner announced the use of networkactivator.com for the Liferay forums, which is a system that sends a list every week of unanswered forum topics. I'm now subscribed for the Theming and Development sections.
- Test new Liferay7 theming features. I've been part of the Liferay 7 Community Expedition from the start, tested some milestone releases and posted a few forum topics about it. I was surprised though when James Falkner mentioned me in his Community Update at DevCon on the leaderboard of the expedition. This motivates me to be involved even more, so I'm actively testing new features in the alpha releases now.
- Get Liferay 7 up and running for my website. Maybe it's very early to already base a live website on on alpha version, but after all it is just a website and no real portal functionality is needed yet. The most important part to be able to put this website online, was to learn about the new theming features of Liferay 7. Lots is changing fo the theming as well, but I managed to convert my Liferay 6.2 theme into a Liferay 7 theme. :)
- Start blogging on vernaillen.com. Which also happened already, because you're reading my first blogpost right now. :)
- And lastly, but maybe the most important one, start building Liferay plugins to distribute through the Liferay Marketplace. I won't share yet what exactly I'm working on, but I might do it when i'm a bit further in the process. :)
Starting this week I will work as a consultant for only 4 days per week instead of 5, which will give me more space to work on my own projects and contribute back to the community.
