Liferay has been developing the new CMS over the course of several quarters and has made it available in stages. Until now, anyone who wanted to test the features had to manually enable them and expect that some details might still change.

With this latest release, the CMS becomes a standard part of the product. It is now officially supported and, for the first time, provides a robust foundation for use in client projects.

Its architecture is specifically designed to meet the needs of larger editorial organizations. So-called “Spaces” group content according to organizational or thematic criteria and have their own members, roles, and settings. At the same time, they can be linked to the “Sites” where the content is displayed.

Content and files are created, edited, searched, and filtered through a shared interface. Vocabularies, categories, and tags can also be managed centrally. Additionally, the system includes translation management and an integrated recycle bin.

For organizations that have previously maintained their content across multiple sites and document libraries, this opens up the possibility of restructuring responsibilities. A Space can, for example, represent a department, a brand, or a country—regardless of which sites use the content maintained there.

Governance with Tangible Business Benefits

In our view, the greatest added value lies not solely in the new editorial interface. The additional features for management, control, and governance are particularly relevant.

In the future, authors and reviewers will be notified when content is about to expire, has already expired, or is due for review. Using appropriate quick filters, the relevant content can be displayed immediately in the overview.

Anyone who still organizes content audits using Excel spreadsheets or conducts extensive manual review rounds at regular intervals can, in the future, delegate part of this work directly to the system.

Role management has also been improved. Design Libraries, Spaces, and projects are technically based on the same foundation. In the past, this meant that when assigning permissions, administrators could sometimes select roles that had no effect in the respective context.

Roles can now be specifically assigned to one of these contexts. Consequently, only the roles that are actually applicable are displayed during selection. This eliminates a recurring source of errors, particularly in complex permission schemes involving many stakeholders.

Sharing content with external parties also falls under the governance category. Content can be made available via email without requiring recipients to have a Liferay account. Access is time-limited.

A typical use case involves external reviewers or auditors who need access to selected documents for a defined period of time.

Improvements for Projects with Multiple Environments

In addition, this release includes numerous minor but practical enhancements.

Content structures can now be exported and imported. Additionally, external reference codes for vocabularies can be edited. This simplifies switching between different environments and prevents API calls from failing due to mismatched references.

Spaces can also be linked to site templates. This automatically grants newly created sites access to centrally managed content.

Additional improvements for day-to-day editorial work include:

• Bulk restoration of content and folders from the Recycle Bin
• Display of technical file properties directly in the info bar
• Creating and editing collections from the Asset Publisher
• Pre-installed system vocabularies such as “Personas” and “Funnel Stage”
• Warnings when deleting fields that have already been published in the Structure Editor
• Previews for Space content in Display Page Templates
• Previews of headless content in external systems

Each of these features is, on its own, more of a minor improvement. Taken together, however, they make day-to-day work with the CMS noticeably more consistent.

How does Liferay position itself relative to headless CMSs?

Many organizations use a specialized headless CMS alongside their portal—for example, Contentful, Storyblok, or Strapi.

These systems really shine in the areas where they were originally designed to excel: API-first architectures, rapid integration with individual front ends, robust developer tools, and streamlined editorial interfaces.

If a marketing website is managed by a dedicated front-end team and does not require a secure or personalized area, such solutions remain a sensible choice.

The difference becomes more apparent as soon as content and applications are closely integrated.

Liferay combines user and role management, authentication, search, forms, data objects, and editorial content into a single platform. As a result, content and data from line-of-business applications can utilize the same authorization model.

In contrast, an architecture consisting of a portal and a separate CMS often requires user information to be synchronized and permissions to be maintained across multiple systems. Additionally, Liferay manages content and files together, whereas in pure headless solutions, documents are often offloaded to a separate digital asset management system.

The new governance features also play an important role in this context. Audit schedules, expiration notices, context-based roles, and time-limited access for external users are particularly relevant in regulated industries and the public sector. Without integrated support, such requirements often have to be addressed through 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 feature for headless content in external systems also demonstrates that decoupled front ends are explicitly taken into account.

This makes a scenario increasingly realistic that is likely to be of interest to many companies: a custom front end—but just one central system for content, users, and permissions.

Development Across the Quarters

Across the Q1, Q2, and Q3 releases, three areas are evolving in a particularly noticeable way: the integration of AI and MCP, the marketing and sales tools, and the new CMS.

The release cadence is particularly evident in the CMS: Initially, it was further developed over several quarters behind a feature flag and refined with each release. Now it is becoming a regular component of the platform.

For companies that are serious about implementing the new CMS, now is therefore a good time to evaluate it in a test environment with realistic content, roles, and permission scenarios.

After all, it’s only under real-world conditions that it becomes clear how well existing editorial processes can be transferred to Spaces—and what organizational changes are necessary to truly realize 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.