In the past two months we (Liones) build a new Liferay based portal for Kluwer (a major Dutch publisher), one of our clients. The purpose of this portal is to help the customers of Kluwer online products to understand and use their products better. This week the Kluwer Support portal was launched with success and I reckoned this was a good moment to share some insight in how we developed that particular portal and what problems we encountered during the development.

But let’s have a look at the result first:

I hope you agree with me when I say that it looks great, I know for a fact a lot of people do. You can find the actual portal at http://www.kluwer.nl/support, although the portal is in Dutch, feel free to look around.

In the next few paragraphs I will share some challenges we faced and the lessons we learned while implementing the Kluwer Support portal.

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Today is the last day of the Liferay development training in Frankfurt, which is too bad because there is so much more to discover about Liferay.

A quick summary of what we have learned during this course:

• Setting up Liferay, the plugin SDK and the Ext environment (allows you to customize the Liferay core)
• Setting up MySQL for Liferay
• Setting up a basic portlet
• Setting up a Liferay entity & service, a portlet which consumes it and hook those two up including validation and localization
• Creating a hook
• Creating a theme
• And a lot more…

I think this will be the last update regarding the Frankfurt training.

A lot of things happened in my life the last couple of weeks. It has been incredably busy and to be honest: I am more than ready for the christmas holiday. Just one more week of work now. I won’t bother you with every little detail so here is a quick list:

• My girlfriend and I moved to our new home.
• I finished the careerportal project I have been blogging about.
• Together with my colleagues I started a new weblog: http://www.technischontwerp.nl/. A weblog for software architects in Holland.

It really has been a while since my last post. It is not that I disappeared or something it has been pretty busy lately and a lot of things changed, most notable: My girlfriend moved in with me in January, it is working well between us and I am glad that we made that decision.

Furthermore I got a promotion to Senior Developer at Liones, which means that I got a lot more responsibilities now. The work has been increasingly more fun, although it takes more energy to do it. I guess I still have to get used to it. I am working on some nice project containing lots of architectural/implementation/managerial difficulties. I will talk about them later.

This is a short update but I am thinking about a few posts in the technical area, you can expect them soon.

This blog has been inaccessible for the last few days because of a bug in the WordPress engine. The bug is fixed now and this weblog should function properly now, please let me know when you find another problem.

At the beginning of this week Liones moved to a new office and today I shot some photos so you can see how it look like. I don’t feel writing a lot of text about it I will rather let the photos do the talking.

I have been very busy lately with creating new private weblogs which are used for internal communication in several projects I am involved in. In this post I will share my experiences about maintaining those blogs as well as how it functions as a communication platform.

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Thursday 11 October 2007, on this memorable day, I went, together with my all of my Liones colleagues, on a trip to a carefully kept secret location. In this post, possible more posts, I will tell you all about my experiences. To ensure that I do not violate anyone’s privacy I will not provide you the names of my colleagues, I will merely refer to their (not so memorable?) actions.

I sincerely hope you like this post.

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You can’t possibly have missed it: Dev @ Work has got a new theme! Last week I started with the new theme, which I should have done earlier. And on this ‘day to remember’ the new theme is launched. I based the new theme on an existing theme made by Abhishek Tripathi. There are still some things to do, for example: change the header image, do some SEO and write a print style.

I am very fond with the new theme and I hope you all like it too.

This week I started with my job @ Liones instead of my job @ Van der Werff Watertechniek, the reason I switched those days was that we have an important meeting tomorrow. The day was quite nice; I did some interesting things on which I am not going to elaborate right now. The evening was truly interesting: I went dining with my boss: Jan Benedictus.

We went to a restaurant called ‘Lof der Zotheid’ which is a really nice restaurant, excellent food and an enjoyable experience: I do recommend it. Anyway, while enjoying our dinner we talked about: Liones, Van der Werff Watertechniek and various other subjects.

The moment which I found the most interesting was when we talked, well more brainstormed actually, about ways to improve Liones as a company. I introduced the idea for an internal weblog/forum/brainstorm platform on which any suggestions on how to improve the company could be discussed. Next we brainstormed about a project Jan had on his mind for quite some time ant talked about several business models.

I love to brainstorm and for some reason I always end up brainstorming with someone about something. Whether it is about programming, businesses, religion or human behaviour, I like it all. I love it possibly more than programming and that means something .

That is it for today. Cheers, until next time!