Highlights and Shortfalls of Liferay’s Web Content Management

Liferay Portal 6 includes a Web Content Management system that integrates really nicely with the portal.  After reviewing Liferay Portal, I’ve come up with my list of highlights and shortfalls of the Liefray’s Web Content Management feature.  My comments are based on what is available in the standard UI.  Of course you could extend Liferay yourself to add features you may find missing.

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Highlights

• Works right out of the box – As soon as Portal finished installing you can begin to create content right away.  There is one standard template available that is generic enough to be used to create rich content immediately
• Integration with Portal – this is where Liferay really shines.  You can easily create content on any page of the portlet with just a couple of clicks.
• Modern User interface – the UI for managing Web Content is used the latest widgets within Liferay.  Creating content is a pleasurable experience within Liferay.
• Localization – if you need to support multiple languages with your content, Liferay makes this pretty easy, compared with other Portals.
• Structures and templates – Structures allow you to define input fields specific to the type of content you need to create.  This is important when you want to capture certain fields from the user.  Templates allow you to display content in a variety of forms using one copy of the data.
• Tagging – authors can tag content rather than wait for users to do the tagging.  This

Shortfalls

• Lack of Folders – this is really strange to me: you can create folders for images and documents, but not web content!  While you can organize content into communities and sub communities, but these are not the same as folders.  When you have more than 20-30 pieces of content, letting users organize them into folders seems like a good feature.  Some have suggested using categories instead of folders.  Either way, you need some way to organize content so authors don’t have to wade through long lists to locate what they want.
• Sharing of content between communities – Liferay does not allow you to share content across communities, unless you put the content into the Global community.  So if you have an article created for your marketing community, you can’t easily display that in the HR community.
• Preview in context – while you can preview content, you don’t see your content previewed in the context of portal.  It would be nice to preview a pieced of content in a specific page.
• Publishing outside of Portal – Liferay intended its Web Content to be used within Portal.  If you want to publish content outside of your portal, there is not an easy way to create a non-portal site from the content.

Overall, Liferay’s Web Content Management feature is a quality part of Liferay Portal and is adequate for managing Portal content.  I think if Liferay addresses some of the shortfalls I mentioned, it could begin to be comparable to other enterprise-level Web Content Management systems.