Case study: East European Performing Arts Platform

The eepap.org service has been made by eo Networks S.A. for the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (Instytut Adama Mickiewicza) –  ‘a state cultural institution whose task is to promote Polish culture around the world and actively participate in international cultural exchange’. The aim of the project was to create the platform for East European artists and institutions to share the information and cooperate in form of arts network. The core of the site is presentation of artists, events and cultural institutions.

Interesting features that we added to standard Liferay 6.0.3 CE are:

1. Event Calendar (based on Web Content Structure and modified Asset Publisher)
2. Advanced Journal Search so you can easily find events or artists
3. Ability to attach files in web form portlet

The event structure enables editors to set the start and end date of events, such as theatre premiere, show, workshops etc. After that Event Calendar portlet will display current month and will mark days when events take place – start, end and all days in between.

eepap.org - main page

 

Web form with attachement

eepap.org - event calendar

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If you have any question find me on East Coast Symposium where I’m gonna give a speech about Liferay Community at 10th May 3:40 pm.

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Newsletter portlet available for testing

Hi all,

As from today you can test newsletter portlet on our sandbox here http://liferay.eo.pl/web/guest/newsletter-portlet . Feel free to add, change, delete. If you find it usefull or you have some ideas how can we improve existing functionalities leave us a comment. Our sandbox is deployed on Liferay 6.0.3 but we can prepare that plugin for newer versions of Liferay. Pricing and licencing is coming soon 🙂

Liferay 6.0 Newsletter portlet – update

Hi all,

As we getting more and more questions about Newsletter portlet (when and how much) here is a little update.

We’re aiming at end of March with release of both Community and Commercial version of our Newsletter portlet. For now we know that it will have double licencing – one for commercial use and one for non-profit, educational purposes. We still thinking about shareing source code – how to do it so we can re-use all the upgrades made to it by community so it can be more functional with every release.

For now our newsletter is scope aware (so you can define different newsletter channels for different scopes e.g communities). Newsletters emails are made by editors with a help of WYSIWYG editor. Editors can assign / delete emails from newsletter channel and export user list to CSV file. There is additional portlet for sign in and out of Newsletter where users can choose desired channels.

Those are basic functionalities planned for first release. We have couple of more waiting in our queue but for now I want to hear what other functionalities do you need boys and girls? 🙂

Update on Newsletter portlet for Liferay Portal

When we first started developing Newsletter portlet we thinked about doing it fast (we needed for our project). That is why we made it directly in Liferay code thinking that later it will be excluded to ext-plugin (and later to external portlet). Well Summer and Fall went by and nothing changed. Almost nothing – we mastered portlet communications and re-use of Liferay portlets (exactly Asset Publisher). So when I wrote about Newsletter portlet I didn’t know that my developers started work on moving it from Liferay core to ext-plugin external portlet. This will allow us to be more independent from Liferay source code changes and to develop changes for next milestones much quicker than expected.

As for business side of that portlet – we want to release it on double licence (currently I’m thinking about which one we should use).  One will be commercial licence with support, user guide. Probably it will be unlimited licence so you will but it one and use it forever so you don’t have to worry about cost of buying it (it will be cheap 🙂 ).

Second one will be free licence. And here we’re thinking how to do it. We can limit functionalities (IMHO it’s not so good idea) but without our advertisement or we can give full functionalities but with little non intrusive ads (for example with our company website address in footer of every mail. Or maybe give it all but only for educational and non-profit purposes?

What do you think about that? Which one would you prefer?

Newsletter portlet for Liferay 6 CE

Liferay 6 is a very nice CMS but sometimes it lacks basic features. One of it is Newsletter. If you go through blogs, forum, google a little bit you will see there is a big demand for that functionality. There are even two ticket in JIRA (LEP-2177 and LPS-14426) and one wiki page butit looks like the work is on hold.

So we decided to make our own Newsletter portlet 🙂

It’s a version 1.0 and it lack most of features mentioned on Liferay wiki page for proposals but:

1. Admin can define as many topics / newsletter lists as he wants.

2. Admin can deploy as many newsletter portlets as he wants.

 

3. Admin can configure what topics will be available to subscribe / unsubscribe in each newsletter portlet.

4. If there is only one lists defined for portlet it won’t show “choose your topic” lists.

5. Users can subcribe withour beign registered in portal

6. After signing up user will recieve confirmation email with “click this link to confirm” message

7. Admin can add user to topic manualy

8. Admin can add users by uploading CSV file

9. Admin can export all users to CSV file

10. Editor can compose email using WYSIWYG editor (with images too).

 

Roadmap for our newsletter portlet is:

1. Add abillity to send categorized / tagged web content

2.  Send automaticaly web content using its “Publish date” field

3.  Control Panel configuration page should be scope-aware

For couple of projects such functionality is enough. I wonder will it ever be done in Liferay CE. For now we’re thinking about releasing our portlet on double licence for free (non-profit, educational) and for commercial use similar to what MyOffice24x7 did with their Survey portlet. If you’re interested in this portlet – just call us or send us an email 🙂