Liferay held its West Coast Symposium for developers and users last week and announced the availability of Liferay Portal 6.1 Beta along with the availability of the developer community release of the new Liferay Marketplace.

The Marketplace is an app store of sorts designed specifically for Liferay users. Liferay developers can develop applications or plug-ins specifically for use in the Liferay Portal product. The enhancements to Liferay Portal 6.1 include new document management and web content management features along with support for workflow forms to build applications with business logic built right in.

With support for standards like Open Social, and the ability to build applications on top of the Liferay platform, Liferay appears to be taking a similar approach to Nuxeo, which has also created an open source platform based on open standards and opened an app store where developers can sell their creations to other Nuxeo users looking for similar functionality.

And Liferay CMO, Paul Hinz is hoping his development community will use this capability to build web applications on top of the Liferay foundation and provide tools at a reasonable cost for the Liferay community.

"Marketplace makes it faster for users to deploy new features to existing websites and portals, and it gives the Liferay community access to the large market of Liferay users worldwide. Just as our open source development model has reduced costs for our core platform, we expect Marketplace to reduce the cost of enterprise software for our community," said Hinz.

The Marketplace was first announced in May at the East Coast Symposium, and the first phase was made available last week at the West Coast Symposium. Liferay Portal 6.1 beta will be available Oct. 14. 

For more information:
- see the Liferay press release

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