Liferay has developed the new CMS over several quarters and made it accessible step by step. Anyone who wanted to test the features so far had to actively switch them on and expect individual details to still change.
With the current release, the CMS becomes a regular part of the product. It is officially supported and thus, for the first time, offers a solid foundation for use in customer projects.
Its design is especially geared to the requirements of larger editorial organizations. So-called spaces bundle content according to organizational or thematic criteria and have their own members, roles and settings. At the same time, they can be connected to the sites on which the content is delivered.
Content and files are created, edited, searched and filtered via a shared interface. Vocabularies, categories and tags can also be managed centrally. In addition, there is translation management and an integrated recycle bin.
For organizations that have so far maintained their content spread across multiple sites and document libraries, this opens up the opportunity to restructure responsibilities. A space can, for example, represent a department, a brand or a country – regardless of which sites the content maintained there is used on.
Governance with concrete operational value
In our view, the greatest added value does not lie solely in the new editorial interface. Particularly relevant are the additional functions for steering, control and governance.
Authors and reviewers will in future be notified when content is about to expire, has already expired or is due for review. Using matching quick filters, the affected content can be displayed directly in the overview.
If you still organize content audits via Excel lists today or carry out extensive manual review rounds at regular intervals, you can hand part of this work directly to the system in the future.
Role management has also been improved. Design libraries, spaces and projects are technically based on the same foundation. In the past, this meant that administrators could sometimes select roles when assigning permissions that had no effect in the respective context.
Roles can now be assigned specifically to one of these contexts. Accordingly, only the roles that actually fit are displayed in the selection. Especially in complex permission concepts with many stakeholders, this eliminates a recurring source of errors.
Sharing content with external people also falls under governance. Content can be provided by email without recipients needing a Liferay account. Access is time-limited.
A typical use case is external reviewers or auditors who are to be given access to selected documents for a defined period.
Improvements for projects with multiple environments
In addition, the release contains numerous smaller but practically relevant additions.
Content structures can now be exported and imported. In addition, external reference codes for vocabularies can be edited. This makes it easier to move between different environments and prevents API calls from coming up empty because of differing references.
Spaces can also be connected to site templates. Newly created sites thus automatically gain access to centrally maintained content.
Further improvements for day-to-day editorial work are:
- Bulk restoration of content and folders from the recycle bin
- Display of technical file properties directly in the info panel
- Creating and editing collections from the Asset Publisher
- Bundled system vocabularies such as “Personas” and “Funnel Stage”
- Warnings when deleting already published fields in the Structure Editor
- Previews for space content in display page templates
- Previews for headless content in external systems
Each of these features is, taken on its own, more of a detailed improvement. Taken together, however, they make daily work with the CMS noticeably more consistent.
How does Liferay position itself against headless CMS?
In many organizations, a specialized headless CMS is used alongside the portal – for example Contentful, Storyblok or Strapi.
These systems play to their strengths above all where they were originally positioned: in API-first architectures, the fast connection of custom frontends, good developer tools and lean editorial interfaces.
If a marketing website is managed by its own frontend team and does not need a protected or personalized area, such solutions remain a sensible choice.
The difference becomes clearer as soon as content and applications are closely interconnected.
Liferay combines user and role management, authentication, search, forms, data objects and editorial content in one platform. Content and data from business applications can thus use the same permission model.
With an architecture consisting of a portal and a separate CMS, on the other hand, user information often has to be synchronized and permissions maintained in multiple systems. In addition, Liferay manages content and files together, whereas with pure headless solutions documents are often outsourced to an additional digital asset management system.
The new governance features also play an important role in this consideration. Review dates, expiration notices, context-specific roles and time-limited access for external people are particularly relevant in regulated industries and the public sector. Without integrated support, such requirements often have to be covered by additional tools or manual processes.
At the same time, Liferay is by no means abandoning the headless approach. Content can still be delivered via REST and GraphQL interfaces. The new preview function for headless content in external systems also shows that decoupled frontends are explicitly taken into account.
This makes a scenario increasingly realistic that is likely to be of interest to many companies: a custom frontend – but only one central system for content, users and permissions.
The development across the quarters
Across the Q1, Q2 and Q3 releases, three areas are evolving especially visibly: the integration of AI and MCP, the marketing and sales tools, and the new CMS.
The release rhythm is particularly easy to see in the CMS: first it was developed further behind a feature flag over several quarters and completed with each release. Now it is becoming a regular part of the platform.
For companies that seriously want to introduce the new CMS, now is therefore a good time to evaluate it in a test environment with realistic content, roles and permission scenarios.
Because only under real conditions does it become clear how well existing editorial processes can be transferred into spaces – and which organizational changes are required to actually exploit the potential of the new architecture.
Portalworks is a Liferay Service Partner for the DACH region and supports portal, CMS and upgrade projects from architecture through to ongoing operations.
