ShouId I migrate from Liferay 6.1 to Liferay 6.2?

Question

I would like to ask a question about wether or not I should do the migration to Liferay 6.2.

Me and my team are working since 4 month on a portal quite big developed with Liferay 6.1 (CE edition) and now, since the project publication date is still 4-5 month ahead (so I do have time), I was wondering if doing the migration to 6.2 now is a good choice.

I already tried the new version and I must say I am impressed about the new features and since now I haven't find any bugs.

Anyone had any experience on developing portlet/themes on Liferay 6.2? Is is worth it to do the migration now or shall I wait for the next ga2 release?

Any suggestion is very welcome.

Thanks

Answer 1

Liferay 6.2 does not (yet) support as many marketplace apps as Liferay 6.1. Also Liferay 6.2 CE has bugs, and patches are available only to EE subscribers; this forced us to use Liferay 6.1 CE instead of 6.2 CE.

Answer 2

You will have issues if you are using the Vaadin framework under Liferay. Liferay 6.2 CE does not support Vaadin out of the box ... it is delivered with Vaadin 6.8, but it is broken - your portlet code will break. You would have to consider moving to Vaadin 7.1 at best ... and that is a non-trivial code migration as many items have been deprecated between 6.8 and 7. I went that route and the learning curve was unexpectedly steep.

Answer 3

Depends mostly on the kind of work you've done on that portal. Even slight upgrades in Liferay, can have major differences in the source code. If this affects the work you've done, it will affect the upgrade too. For example, things will get difficult to update if :

1. You have developed custom portlets, as they will need recompilation for the new runtime
2. Developed Portlets that use ServiceBuilder might need more work than just a recompilation
3. Using Hooks (even simple jsp hooks) might need re-writing. ext hooks will almost certainly need to, and it can become a major pain

On, the other hand, if most of your work had to do with light theming and content management, it could become an relatively easy and painless upgrade.

In any case, make sure to keep a backup of your Liferay Database, because once you upgrade, there is no way to downgrade back to the initial version.

Answer 4

As you're using CE, my recommendation is to upgrade as soon as possible. Reason is that there are no more updates for 6.1, now that 6.2 is out. If you're going live in 5 months, you'd be on a version that's unsupported for half a year at the date of publication.

The alternative is to go to EE, which is supported for ~5 years from release, e.g. you'll have several years of support in front of you. However, as Liferay is paying my salary, note that I might be biased...

Of course, being unsupported "by Liferay" does not mean that you won't be able to fix any bugs or issues, but you'll have to do this on your own, and sooner or later you should upgrade anyway... If you're not yet live, I'm recommending to do it sooner.