The sad hideous truth of Liferay…
I still love Liferay, but this may save some people a bit of heart break! I went through almost exactly the same journey in choosing Liferay for a new large scale website.
At first it seems to offer everything you ever wanted in a portal system, even more so (including making the coffee), but once you start to look beneath the hood, things become a little murkier. It was after a shambolic training course that I fell out of love with Liferay, but after looking through a few alternatives, it became the best contender again.
It’s all about managing expectations…
Your Software Made Me Cry: How to Select an Open-Source Java Portal for your Enterprise.
Hey Steven,
Thanks for your nice words about Liferay. I’ve one of its developers and we are always very interested in ideas to improve it.
When you said “once you start to look beneath the hood, things become a little murkier” can you be a little bit more specific so that we can improve the things you didn’t like?
Comment by Jorge — February 14, 2009 @ 12:54 pm
Hi Steven, sorry to hear your training experience was unfavorable. Was it with our training folks? Can you email us with details about where and when you took the course?
Comment by Alice Cheng — February 17, 2009 @ 7:10 pm
… true words, my friend. E.g. JQuery. 1.3.2 is out there for a year (!) liferay comes still bundled with 1.2.6 … this is just a small example about “murkier”… (Yes, I know, they are currently developing something like an abstraction layer for JQuery/YUI as far as I know – but it is about today and not about somewhere in the future)
Comment by Steffen Schuler — October 2, 2009 @ 12:01 pm