Around 2000, a very young software developer named Brian Chan volunteered to create a website for his church. He wanted to make it dynamic and fully featured as well as easy to update for end users. During the first few years of Liferay’s existence, there was no company behind it. It was a small open-source project that was slowly gaining a community. Soon it became popular and the community grew. Because Liferay was an open-source project, it received contributions from all over the world. Key contributors came not just from Los Angeles, but from Canada, Spain, Hong Kong, and all over the united states. A major system built on Liferay was implemented in the school system in Madrid. That’s how Liferay evolved. Liferay was declared the “Best Open Source Portal” by InfoWorld in 2007.