Dear DhO,

It is Spring, the time when young hearts turn to thoughts of love, and for some reason we often consider braving the madness that is upgrading this platform to Liferay 7.

We tried this once before some years ago, and it sucked, and we went screaming back to Liferay 6. However, this time, we will build a sandbox and play with it a while and see if we can work out all the bugs first, and hopefully Liferay 7 has grown up a bit in the meantime.

Nothing to do at this point for any of you, but just realize that at some point there will likely be more announcements about some downtime and what to expect when Liferay 7 is implemented, if it is implemented.

Just letting you all know.

Thanks to the quixotic tech volunteers crazy enough to try this and who give their time and expertise to help the DhO,

Daniel
Third underservant to the chambermaid of the DhO

Christopher, Manish, and Simon are again working on the Liferay 7 upgrade project: many thanks for their kind donation of time and expertise.

I will let you know how it goes here. Again, nothing to do, just realize that at some point this platform may have a somewhat different look and somewhat different feel, but hopefully it will be easier to read on mobile devices and have improved functionality overall. There will be warnings before we switch over so it hopefully won't throw people.

I don't recall if this topic came up in one of the other Liferay-hell threads, but have you considered migrating away from it? It's starting to seem like a sunk cost fallacy.

I know you've praised the potential power of using Liferay in the past. But:

1) We don't really use it for anything more than a standard forum ("message board portlet"), a bit of a Wiki, and sometimes chat (does it even work anymore?).

2) Even if we wanted one monolithic hunk of software with more features than a standard forum provides (questionable), there are better alternatives than Liferay for that (pretty sure).

My suggestion would be to use a more modern, well-supported forum software and then whatever else is needed can be separate. Real-time chat? Discord, Slack, etc. Wiki features beyond what a forum software provides? Dedicated Wiki software. Etc. Something like Discourse fits the forum bill. It's modern, popular, looks good, featureful, open-source, can be self-hosted, can be managed hosted by Discourse itself, etc. They use it over at Suttacentral, for example.

I was reading a bit about Liferay and, predictably, they don't make it easy to migrate away from them. We'd have to use the API and manually dump all the posts in the format that Discourse (or whatever) wants. It would be a pain in the ass, links inside posts would probably break, formatting might be a pain, etc. But, I think it's probably better than continuing to invest in an overkill, dying solution.

Thoughts?

Discord would be pretty awesome even if it just augments the current solution. Maybe we could do weekly voice chat...

To avoid derailing, I made a thread about that

https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/15158743

I find the current solution so much better. I’m impressed with how technically reliable it is for a forum, at least from my perspective as a user. Discord is charming in its own way, but I find that it is difficult to keep track of what is new and find old posts. Also, it doesn’t allow long posts.

Just wanted to add a vote for this, FWIW.

I keep on getting errors when I try to post on the forum, and it's doing my head in a little

If it's any help, I know some great developer types who could assist.

Ok, Simon is going to attempt a Liferay 7.3 Upgrade from our current 6.2. The first time we tried this, it worked but we decided that Liferay 7.1 had so many problems we ran screaming back to Liferay 6.2. Now, hopefully 7.3 will be much better, and apparently Simon thinks this is a viable upgrade path.

We hopefully will be able to test this before deploying it.

We will give you warning here before we shut the site to upgrade.

Thanks for your patience, and apologies for any inconveniences this causes.

Daniel,
Third underservant to the chambermaid of the DhO