Radio Liferay

Liferay for your ears: Episode 9 of Radio Liferay is another premier: This marks the first recording with more than one interviewee, as well as the first non-Liferay Employees. I used the opportunity during the european symposium to get together with Corné Aussems, Maarten van Heiningen, Milen Dyankov and  Tomáš Polešovský, four Community Contributors.

Part of my original intent was to speak about their contributions and learn what Liferay can do better with regards to accepting contributions. Turns out that this was a handpicked crowd of notorious contributors that praised more than they criticized - well, so be it, it's good to hear this.

Among other topics, we spoke about

• Naturally: The Symposium and what it's all about: Meeting people, the energy. All four of them work with/for Liferay Partner Companies. Stating also my personal recommendation: If you have any chance to make it to one of Liferay's symposium, make sure to go.
• Tomáš best known contribution is the initial Extlet (now ext-plugin). This made it possible to move from the initial monolithic and huge ext-environment (singular) to very lightweight plugins (plural) in 6.0
• Corné started with Liferay 3.x, is the Dutch translation leader.
• Milen contributed the mobile device detection using WURFL, which he also demoed during the symposium.
• Maarten is involved with themes, usability and accessibility. Also, he pushed "commenting as a guest", a new feature in 6.1
• All of them contribute to many of the active community programs, Bugsquad, 100 paper cuts, etc. that James introduced.
• Getting responses from core Liferay developers and personnell during the symposium and in the community.
• Get knowledgable by learning from helping others:
• Milen's and Tomasz's work on the Maven SDK

I hope that a lot of the enthusiasm that I've seen in this round as well as in any symposium I've been to can be transferred through the recording.

It was a great opportunity to get together with these guys, but sadly the episode is shorter than it could have been - we recorded this towards the end of the symposium, just before the community excellence awards were handed out - and as some of the participators were receiving them, I couldn't keep them busy for longer.

No children were harmed during the recording of this podcast - at least not by us: There were a few playing outside, running around and screaming - and the hotel room was not too soundproof, so this got onto the recording.