I’m at the Liferay West Coast Symposium and just attended a session on the new content management system features presented by Ray Auge. First off, many people talk about the blending of features between the portal and the CMS, and for Liferay, this is intentional. When asked in the elevator what is Liferay, a staffer replied its a web content management system. That makes it easy to explain to non-technical people, but does capture the thought that portal and content management are joined together.
For new features in Liferay 6.1, editing content in context is a big feature. Content editing is done right on page; you don’t have go to a different interface to enter content. Here is a quick run down of some other new features:
- Quick access to recent conten
- Simpler management of web content translations, include more localized translations for the fields labels.
- Fast, type centric content addition – allows you to use defined structures or templates right away
Structures are to Liferay what templates are to other content systems. Liferay has made improvements to structures too:
- Can have default values in the structures
- Added form navigator to allow moving between sections of the forms – useful for larger forms
- Added new UI to create new pages from page templates; includes some new templates
The Asset Publisher portlet has been revised to make it easier to target content to specific pages:
- Can target specific pages for content and can target assets for specific content
- Content can now be addressed with a canonical URL so it can be included in site indices useful for SEO
- Can associate assets with content
- Staging
Content staging has the following improvements:
- Added a new staging level (2 werein 6.0) for page versioning and branching. You can indicate which content is managed in the staging environment vs what’s on live site. For example, you can indicate that social content is always live, but other content gets staged.
- Version Management has a newer interface that allows navigation from staging to live content, search for history, publish content or send it through workflow.
Site variation is a new concept. This allows you to create multiple versions or branches of a site and the publish the version you want:
- No limit to what can be branched.
- Can clone from variations – you can create boilerplate implementations and copy from there.
Search improvements include a new faceted search API:
- Faceted Search API now built in and is supported by Lucene and Solr out of the box.
- Can have multiple facets like tags, time, etc.
- You can add your own facets through JSON and a hook.
- Facet manager is coming in 6.2
- Search grabs all content from across portal, including content, assets, blogs, etc.
Users can now customize pages themselves much easier:
- This allows admins to designate which parts of page can be customized by the user
- User will get a message if they customized a page and the admin changes the default. User can switch back to the default if they want.
Out of everything you’ve mentioned I think the most exciting new features are the faceted search integration to Solr and the content staging improvements.
I’m seeing more interest in better search from clients. They don’t say, “We want faceted search” They just say search needs to be improved and it’s needed no matter what the search engine is. (Google, Solr/Lucene, Autonomy, FAST, etc.)