We are very excited to share the details and features of the latest version Liferay DXP 7.3. As the Platinum Partner in North America, we wanted to share some of the major pieces of this next iteration. Feel free to contact us and we can walk you through this new version of Liferay and how your business can leverage them to deliver the best experiences for your users.
While each version comes with a number of new features and enhancements across the entire platform, with Liferay DXP 7.3., there are 5 major categories of focus that we will be breaking down; Search Engine Optimization, Site Building, Design Systems, Content Intelligence, and Business Operations. While these categories may seem disconnected, each one represents different user journeys for the different team members within an organization as you build sites and applications.
SEO
Search engine optimization is a critical part of the success of a site as this is the first step in attracting new users or customers. Then, once they are on the site you need to ensure they are being delivered with the content they expected. In Liferay DXP 7.3., there is now support to Open Graph. Open Graph provides a preview of how a page or piece of content will be presented on social media or google search results. This allows marketers to define tailored messaging for social media while previewing social media and search engine page representation.
Unfortunately, the work of SEO is not done when a user lands on a page. If they are being presented a 404 error, they will immediately exit creating a negative user experience and create a negative impact on a site’s SEO. There is now functionality to easily create redirection to avoid 404 errors. Liferay now includes lists of URLs that users have attempted to access and received a 404 error, allowing you to create redirects for those attempted pages as well. Finally, you now have the ability to view a list of friendly URLs that are being used and are able to delete them if no longer needed or restore them if needed again.
Site Building
In the last few releases, there has been heavy investment made to provide the functionality to make it more intuitive for content and page authors to build pages and build content. In DXP 7.3., there have been some substantial improvements to the UI as well.
This release gives designers even greater flexibility by creating newly composed fragments and responsive layouts for any device. Those containers and grid fragments can be saved to allow new fragments to be created from any combination of fragments and widgets with no need for development. Grid fragments allow great control over the layout. Ex: split one row into rows and columns as needed. Grid fragments also allow support for different layouts for different devices.
DXP 7.3. has enhanced its ability to publish lists of content. Previously, you would use one of the most commonly used widgets, the Asset Publisher. In 7.3., Collections allow for the configuration of the Asset Publisher without the display settings. Collections allow lists of content to be manually or dynamically selected and presented to users. Once these Collections are created, they can be used in an Asset Publisher, the new Collection Display fragment, and through REST APIs for headless use cases. Collections can be personalized for any user segment. Collection Pages can be very quickly created to allow the display of a collection with no effort.
Collection Display fragments provide page authors with the capabilities to display dynamic content and easily display lists. Collection Display fragments also allow the display of Collections using one or more fragments. This functionality builds on the ability to map structured content fields to in-line editable zones which enables the reuse of fragments for multiple content structures.
The next major feature is a function called Asset Libraries. These enable a couple of key use cases. The first is if you are building a headless application, up till now you needed to access the content in the context of a site; which if you are building a headless application, the site context didn’t make sense. The second, is when you want to build dedicated libraries of content, to support a campaign for example, and you want that content to be accessible across multiple sites, the Asset Libraries is a new way to achieve that.
There is also new functionality around the publication. If you have used Liferay for any number of years, you would be familiar with the functionality of Staging. Content Publication is a new approach centered around content authors, marketers, and designers (rather than a centralized/IT function); giving them full control of the preview and publication of their content. Users create a Publication and while working in it, all changes are automatically added. Publications can be reviewed, published, and if needed, rolled back. If two users make changes to the same asset/content, Publications has conflict detection and provides a choice option to resolve those types of conflicts. Multiple users can work on the same Publication simultaneously. Publications work on the global level where Staging only works at a site level.
With the initial release of Liferay DXP 7.3., it will support the creation of linear workflows, and a later release will also support more complex workflows.
Design Systems
This is a new area for Liferay and the objective is to support designers bringing their brand into the platform and doing it in a way that doesn’t involve IT. Liferay DXP has had themes and templates for many years to give the overall look and feel for a site. Now Master Pages allow non-developer users to define Master Page Templates which can be used throughout a site. IT resources are no longer required for creating Layout Templates. A non-developer can easily define rows & columns, headers, footers, navigation, Drop Zone where authors can deploy fragments and widgets, and control which fragments can be deployed. Master Pages are reusable for any number of pages.
The second component of design systems is what is called Style Books. The goal is to enable designers to bring their branding into the platform to support marketers in staying on-brand. Style Books allow the look and feel of a DXP application to be modified without needing customization or development. Designers can create Style Books which allow a brand’s colors, fonts, spacing, etc. to be overlaid on a theme through configuration only. Page creators and designers pick from approved Style Books for their creations; confident that they are staying on-brand.
Content Intelligence
Liferay Analytics Cloud has been available for a few years now and is a very powerful tool to allow users to understand how assets are being consumed and performing on their sites. Now that data that was previously locked away in the Liferay Analytics Cloud, is now brought into the DXP platform. Now the content authors are able to get an understanding of how their content is performing within the context of that content. Also provides AI and Machine Learning tools to give recommendations to the authors on how to optimize experiences. Additionally, there is now a Content Author Dashboard to allow authors to find and analyze their content is a user-focused presentation. There is a new method of categorization called Internal Categories, which empowers marketing teams and authors to understand the distribution of the types of content that in being created for auditing purposes. This allows those teams to make decisions on how they might optimize their content strategies. Finally, by incorporating metrics from Liferay Analytics Cloud, authors can track the performance of their content as it pertains to engagement and SEO.
One of the big releases of this pillar is a new capability called App Builder. This enables non-developer business users to create custom objects and applications using a low-code/no-code approach to represent a business application. This function allows for the building of custom data objects to support almost any business context with no development. The user can then define the form view in which the data will be entered. There is also the ability to customize table views to present different views of the collected data. These built apps can be deployed in a number of ways such as widgets, standalone apps, and the application menu.
Within App Builder, there are a number of features such as custom rules which allow users to build complex intelligent forms with fields grouped into Fieldsets if required. The Fieldsets are used to logically group related fields together to speed up the creation and maintenance of commonly related information e.g. Addresses. Another feature is the ability to auto-populate selection fields by calling REST web services.
In addition to the basic App Builder, Liferay DXP 7.3. allows business users to create Workflow Powered Apps to automate business process operations. This allows the App Builder objects and forms to be incorporated into a click-based business-workflow builder. With the initial release of Liferay DXP 7.3., it will support the creation of linear workflows, and a later release will also support more complex workflows (e.g. branching). Users will also have access to workflow metrics to understand the performance and health of their processes.
Finally, there have been enhancements made to the Forms Builder to improve the functionally in building complex forms, support for GDPR, and new forms report to allow for the analysis of collected data by each field. The enhanced Forms Builder also allows for fields to be repeated as a group and the re-ordering of pages and fields within those pages.
