LOS ANGELES – Liferay has unveiled Liferay Portal 4.0, a major new release of the open source Web portal that makes portal development and operation more versatile, secure and attractive. Liferay Portal 4.0 has improvements that benefit administrators, portal creators, and end-users alike, from an improved security model to a new library of themes that can be implemented even at the page level.

As an open source product, Liferay Portal [1] is freely available under an MIT license. Suitable for even the most sophisticated Web portals, Liferay Portal supports virtually all types of middleware and database platforms including JBoss JEMS, BEA Platform, WebSphere, Oracle and others; it also conforms with the industry standard JSR-168 portal API for easy integration with existing portal elements.

With Liferay Portal 4.0, Liferay has listened to its users to create enhancements that are practical, convenient and powerful. Among the improvements are:

• Improved Security — Liferay Portal 4.0 supports user permissioning at the portlet level. Administrators can set or restrict access to portlets and portlet objects; they can also delegate permissioning authority to others. Access can be set at the individual, community or object levels, and temporary "guest" permissions can also be given;
  
  
• Enterprise Taxonomy — Version 4.0 gives enterprises the ability to create separate portals or sub-portals according to corporate structure. For example, a division or branch office can have a portal within the corporate portal;
  
  
• Velocity Template Support — Portal developers can enjoy the newly added convenience of support for templates generated by Velocity, the Java-based template engine, when creating or updating portals and constituent portlets/pages;
  
  
• Private/Public Pages — Portal users can now post pages and objects with public and private viewing properties. A photography club, for example, can enable members to post pictures viewable by the general public, or on private pages viewable only by club members. Private pages require password/login;
  
  
• Theme Enhancements — In addition to making a number of new graphical themes available, Liferay has made it possible for users to specify themes for individual pages or groups of pages;
  
  
• JSR-170 Compliance — Version 4.0 introduces JSR-170 support to Liferay Portal via Jackrabbit integration, with the Document Library currently conforming to the standard.
  
  
• More Documentation--Over 100 additional pages of instructions and other material are now available to make using Liferay Portal easier than ever.

In addition to these new features and tools, Liferay anticipates adding support for a workflow portlet that integrates with the jBPM workflow engine. That addition will be available in the very near future in Liferay Portal 4.0.1.

"Convenience and flexibility have always been the hallmarks of Liferay Portal, and with Version 4.0 we've continued that tradition with the kinds of enhancements our users want," said Brian Chan, founder and chief software architect of Liferay. "Whether you're creating, using, or managing an enterprise portal, Liferay Portal 4.0 is an important and valuable update that is truly worth adopting."

Version 4.0 is available in both current editions of Liferay Portal—Liferay Portal Professional, the standard product; and Liferay Portal Enterprise, which includes all Professional features plus the ability to cluster portlet transactions across multiple servers. The product is available for immediate download in both editions.