Make sure the feature doesn’t already exist. It almost sounds humorous to say that, but I figured I’d mention it anyway. You might post a message about the feature on Liferay’s message boards to see if there’s wider interest in it, too.

Optional: if you’re implementing the feature for your organization, you should implement it in Ext first, so that you and your organization can take advantage of the feature right away.

Grab Liferay’s source as a download or clone it from Liferay’s Github repository (https://github.com/liferay/liferay-portal), and make your changes in the source. Your source should follow Liferay’s code-development guidelines, which I’ve modeled for you in the source for this book.^[1]

^[1] The complete list of guidelines is here: http://mng.bz/MWcO

Create a patch for your features. Your patch should include only differences and should not include any differences generated from Service Builder, because the services will be regenerated anyway by Liferay’s engineering team.

Go to Liferay’s issue management system at http://issues.liferay.com, and add a New Feature issue describing the feature in detail. Attach to this issue the patch you created in the previous step, and name the patch according to the issue number you receive from the system and the SVN revision number against which you wrote the code. Example: LPS-12345-build-54321.patch.

Click Contribute Solution on your issue. If you’ve reported the issue, you can also click Accept Contribution to change the state to Community Resolved. If somebody else added the ticket, that person will have to accept the contribution.