rm -rf /opt/liferay

Sheesh, another Liferay install down the tubes. This is getting ridiculous.

Unfortunately I can't find another portal application with a half way decent document management system included. If anyone knows of anything, let me know. I'm currently downloading the just-released Liferay 5.1.1 which I'll be hating in approximately ten minutes.

Here's some advise for anyone who is thinking about using Liferay:

1) Liferay is extremely convoluted. The end-user system is organized the way a Java programmer might organize his source files. This does not lend itself to useability. Your users, if not extremely competent, won't know what the hell is going on or where they are in the system half the time.

2) Liferay is extremely customizable, but not in a meaningful way. The concept of a "personal space" and a "public" space within the portal all exist, as you might expect, but merging the two concepts into one concise "website" is very difficult.

3) The permissions system has fine-grained itself into sand. You have users, roles, groups, communities, and organizations all duking it out at once over private and public pages organized by user, community, and organization.

A prime example of how this fails is this: you can add users to an organization, and then add organizations to a community. This sounds good, especially for an extranet application. However, just because a user belongs to an organization that belongs to a community does not mean that the various portlets within the community will recognize that the user is part of the organization that belongs to the community. Whew, that's a mouthful. Here's what I mean: if you create a community-wide announcement, users who only belong to organizations that belong to the community will not see the announcement, because the system doesn't realize that they are implicitly part of the community. One way around this is to create a catch-all user group where you dump all of the users who belong to the various organizations that are part of your community. You should also then create a group for each organization in case you want to send announcements to individual organizations through the same announcement instance. Ok, so you're now managing three groups in addition to your community and organizations. Why? Who the hell knows. It's a nightmare.

4) Extending the system is a horrible thing. Just don't, unless it's going to be your full time job. Every single Java technology that has ever escaped from Java Hell is used behind the scenes. You're going to have to know them all. In depth. There are so many references to references to references that you're going to have half a dozen files open just trying to figure out how to make one silly change. Be careful, do something wrong, even in an external portlet, and you could break your install. (why do you think I'm here bitching while waiting for 5.1.1 to download!?) And of course in Java web development style, every little change you try out means restarting the application server, regardless of whether it's in an actual java class or just raw HTML in some template. Wearing a watch? Don't.

5) Documentation was good at around 4.4. Now it sucks. And the fact that liferay.ca expired and the last Wiki overhaul broke every link in the universe, don't even bother using Google. The Wiki isn't getting updated very well. Development documentation is awful. Just awful. The days of the Lifecast seem to be over.

6) The community is virtually non-existant. I would speculate that 70-90% of all questions asked in the forums go unanswered or unresolved. People posting code examples don't often check their work (because it would take about an hour to do so!). The forum software itself doesn't handle code examples at all because they're using a stupid fixed width template.

7) It's a resource hog. Most Java portals are. It's amazing at all the code that runs just to render a typical payload. They've got all their bases covered, for sure, having used every existing technology all at once, but unfortunately there's only one guy playing, and he's standing in right field with his finger in his nose looking up at some birds.

7) What's with the Christian portlets? I mean, Jesus H Christ, nobody ever mentions this. It's a bit odd. Is it a statement? "Look, we know this shit is hard... so here's a Prayer Portlet."

The sad thing is that Liferay seems to be miles ahead of other opensource portal solutions. Nothing would make me happier than a complete feature freeze and a complete examination of how the system is actually being used by, like, people 'n stuff. I really think that all of the features are there, they just need to work properly and take into consideration more than one use case.

As it stands I am very close to keeping Sharepoint as my internal portal even though I really don't like being locked into Microsoft products. The project I'm currently using Liferay for is an extranet and not entirely critical. Based on what I've learned from the experience there's almost no way that I can deploy this software internally and expect it to function well in the short or long term. (BTW, this little project of mine is supposed to be demoed tomorrow. Haha. haha ahdhhahaha haha ah ah ahha aha ah aha aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ha.)

Oop, my download is done. Ahh, nothing like a fresh install to reinstate my sense of hope.

Back in ten minutes...