Sorry for the delay in posting my monthly article on where we are with respect to the Portal project. I was waiting for us to finalize the roadmap for the remainder of 2k5 and we were also a bit busy pushing out the RC2 release, which works with Hibernate3 and has much simpler install and configuration process. Frankly, installation is now a no-brainer and we can thank Julien for making this a reality.

I'm going to do things a little backwards this month and focus on the most important piece of news-at-hand first...

And the downloads are...
Lets take a break this month from posting every number I can find related to JBoss Portal and just focus on one number: 27487. So what does it mean? You should all know by now how much I value download numbers as a reflection of the overall health and growing adoption of a project. So, 27487 is the amount of downloads JBoss Portal has had for the month of May, compared to 12,000+ for April.

So lets put this all in perspective by comparing our numbers to other OS projects (we pretty much lapped them). For example, lets take a quick look at Liferay and see how they're doing in the downloads arena from stats on sf.net. Their 3.2 release has seen 10,000+ downloads per month. Lapped. ;-) 'nuff said.

Important Dates:
So now that we have our roadmap spec'd out, all that remains is adding in some more information on some of the line-items and assigning firm dates to each major and the incremental releases leading up to them. You can see the roadmap here.

• 2.0.1 (Maintenance Release) - August
• 2.2 (Blade) - November 2k5
• 2.4 (Diablo) - No ETA.

There are some other tasks that are not pegged to the release cycle that we should keep in mind. We have our JBoss Labs Team building out the new JBoss Forge on top of portal. They are busy adding in a lot of cool features like the Xwiki portlet, a downloads portlet, and CMS portlets that integrate with SVN repositories. All of this work will be open sourced, once complete, adding to the JBoss Portal project.

Team and Tasks:

• As mentioned before. Julien added in a bsh script that makes installation an absolute breeze - creating the DB tables for you on any Hibernate-support RDBMS and even creating the initial CMS content for you.
• We refreshed the wiki a bit. We made sure to only post portlets and themes that are working. You can download them here.
• The webinar this last month was a great success. We had 100 folks show up and they even stayed through my demo on "how to configure and deploy a custom theme. For those of you that missed it, you can view the recording here. A lot of great questions were asked, so thanks for the great participation!
• As far as the roadmap items go, I will blog soon and elaborate on who is going to do what. I've been tasked with implementing JCR, and I know a lot of you out there have a lot of questions about Portal + JCR and how it will all fit together. Concerns about the theme API and WSRP will be addressed there as well.