Publishing Assets

As you create web content, it’s important to keep in mind that to Liferay DXP, the pieces of content are assets, just like message board entries and blog posts. This allows you to publish different kinds of content using Liferay DXP’s Asset Publisher. You can use the Asset Publisher to publish a mixed group of various kinds of assets such as images, documents, blogs, and of course, web content. This helps in creating a more dynamic web site: you can place user-created wiki entries, blog posts, or message board messages in context with your content. You’ll examine some of the Asset Publisher’s features next.

Querying for Content

The Asset Publisher is a highly configurable application that lets you query for mixed types of content on the fly. By giving you the ability to control what and how content is displayed from one location, the Asset Publisher helps you to “bubble up” the most relevant content to your users.

To get to all the application’s options, click the Options icon (Options) in the application’s menu. If you click the Configuration option and then Setup (if necessary), you can configure the Asset Publisher’s settings from the following three areas:

  • Asset Selection
  • Display Settings
  • Subscriptions

Asset Selection allows you to configure which assets are displayed. You can set asset selection to either Dynamic or Manual. With dynamic asset selection, assets are automatically displayed based on certain rules or filters. For example, you can set the Asset Publisher to display only assets of a certain type or assets to which certain tags or categories have been applied. With manual asset selection, the Asset Publisher only displays assets that have been explicitly selected by an administrator.

The Asset Publisher supports a scope that restricts both dynamic and manual asset selection. The Asset Publisher can only display assets from its configured scope. By default, the Asset Publisher app is scoped to the site of the page to which it was added. You can, however, customize the scope from the Asset Selection section of the Asset Publisher configuration window. To extend your Asset Publisher’s scope, click Select under Scope and choose either Global to add the global scope, Pages… to add the scope to specific pages, or Other Site… to add the scope of anther site.

The Display Settings section of the Asset Publisher configuration window lets administrators customize many details that determine how content is displayed. The Subscription section allows administrators to enable, disable, or configure email subscriptions and RSS subscriptions. In the following sections, you’ll explore the available configurations for the Asset Selection, Display Settings, and Subscriptions sections of the Asset Publisher’s configuration window. You’ll start by learning how select content manually. You’ll see that it’s very similar to using the Web Content Display application except that you can select assets of any type, not just web content articles.

Selecting Assets Manually

By selecting Manual from the select box beneath Asset Selection, you’re telling the Asset Publisher that you want to select content manually. You can configure multiple scopes, including the global scope, from which to select assets.

Figure 1: Selecting assets in the Asset Publisher manually is similar to selecting assets in the Web Content Display application except that you can select assets of any type, not just web content. You can also add scopes to expand the list of assets that are available to be displayed in the Asset Publisher.

Figure 1: Selecting assets in the Asset Publisher manually is similar to selecting assets in the Web Content Display application except that you can select assets of any type, not just web content. You can also add scopes to expand the list of assets that are available to be displayed in the Asset Publisher.

When selecting assets manually, you’ll see a list of configured scopes under the Scope heading. Click the “X” button at the right to remove a scope from the list. Click the Select button to add additional scopes to the Asset Publisher’s configuration. After you’ve added a scope, a new Select button appears under the Asset Entries heading. A list of assets selected for display appears in the Asset Entries section. You can select assets to be displayed by clicking on the appropriate Select button. One button appears for each configured scope. By default, the available asset types include the following:

  • Blogs Entry
  • Bookmarks Entry
  • Bookmarks Folder
  • Calendar Event
  • Basic Document
  • Google Docs
  • Contract
  • Marketing Banner
  • Online Training
  • Sales Presentation
  • Documents Folder
  • Dynamic Data Lists Record
  • Message Boards Message
  • Basic Web Content
  • Web Content Folder
  • Wiki Page

You can select any number of assets to be displayed. Note, however, that there’s a display setting called Number of Items to Display that determines the maximum number of items to display (or, if pagination is enabled, the maximum number of items to display per page). The Asset Publisher enables you to mix and match different asset types in the same interface. When you’re done selecting items to display, click Save. Any selected assets are added to the list of assets that are displayed by the application. Once you have your content selected, you can configure the display types to configure how the content appears. We’ll discuss the display settings in more detail after we finish discussing how to select assets for display.

While manual asset selection allows you to select assets of various types from different scopes, it can be time-consuming to periodically update the assets that should be displayed. It’s often more convenient to use the Asset Publisher to select content dynamically.

Selecting Assets Dynamically

The Asset Publisher’s default behavior is to select assets dynamically according a set of customizable rules. These rules can be stacked on top of each other so that they compliment each other to create a nice, refined query for your content. You can define complicated rules for selecting assets for display and Liferay DXP automatically takes permissions into account. Liferay’s Asset Publisher performs well in these situations since it queries by search index instead of querying the database directly. You have the following options for creating rules for selecting content:

Scope: Choose the sites from which the content should be selected. This works the same way as with manual asset selection: assets can only be displayed if they belong to a configured scope. The following scope options are available for an Asset Publisher:

  • Current Site
  • Global
  • Other Site

The Other Site scope option is unavailable for Asset Publisher applications configured on a page template (e.g., Content Display Page).

Asset Type: Choose whether you’ll display any assets or only assets of a specific type, such as only web content, only wiki entries, or any combination of multiple types.

Filter: Add as many filters on tags or categories as you like. You can choose whether the content must contain or must not contain any or all of the tags or categories that you enter.

Figure 2: You can filter by tags and categories, and you can set up as many filter rules as you need.

Figure 2: You can filter by tags and categories, and you can set up as many filter rules as you need.

Once you’ve set up your filter rules for dynamically selecting content, you can decide how the content will be displayed.

You can configure the Asset Publisher to display assets that only match the custom user profile attributes. This setting retrieves assets that have matching categorization. These categories must be from the global context. For example, suppose a user had a custom field called Location with the type Text. Also assume the user’s location attribute is set to Moon. You could create a vocabulary called Location and a category for the Location vocabulary called Moon. Then you could categorize content with Moon in the Location vocabulary. With this organizational setup, adding an Asset Publisher and specifying Location as the Asset Publisher’s custom user attribute would only display content that had been categorized as Moon. Pretty cool, right?

In addition, you can use these advanced filters:

  • Show only assets with Welcome as its display page displays only assets specifically configured for the Welcome page.
  • Include tags specified in the URL? lets you specify tags in the URL for the Asset Publisher to display.

The Ordering and Grouping section of the Asset Publisher lets you precisely control how content is ordered and grouped when displayed. You can order the assets displayed by Asset Publisher in ascending or descending order by the following attributes:

  • Title
  • Create Date
  • Modified Date
  • Publish Date
  • Expiration Date
  • Priority

For instance, suppose you have a series of “How To” articles that you want displayed in descending order based on whether the article was tagged with the hammer tag. Or, suppose you want a series of video captures to display in ascending order based on a category called birds. For these use cases, you can configure the ordering and grouping settings.

You can also configure a second ordering. The second ordering would be applied to any assets for which the first ordering wasn’t sufficient. For example, suppose you chose to order assets by title and there are multiple assets with the same title. Then the second ordering would take effect. For example, you could order all the assets that had the same title by their publication dates.

You can establish grouping rules as well as ordering rules. You can group assets by type or by vocabulary. For example, suppose there’s a vocabulary called Membership Type that belongs to your site. Suppose this vocabulary has two categories: Premium and Regular. If you group assets by Membership Type, all assets with the Premium category will be displayed in one group and all assets with the Regular category will be displayed in another group. Grouping rules are applied before any ordering rules: they’re a way to divide up the displayed assets into separate lists. The ordering rules are applied separately to each group of assets.

Note that grouping and ordering rules are only one mechanism to control how your content will be displayed. You can refine the display through many other display settings which you’ll examine next.

Note: The following actions will have immediate effects in your Asset Publisher:

  • Change the value of the Asset Selection option.
  • Change the value of the Scope option.
  • Select, add, sort or delete asset entries (only when selecting assets manually).

Other changes in the rest of the options will come into effect after clicking Save.

Configuring Display Settings

Open the Display Settings subtab of the Setup tab of the Asset Publisher’s Configuration window. Here, you can configure many more settings that control the Asset Publisher’s behavior and that determine how the Asset Publisher displays content. The Display Settings section gives you precise control over the display of your assets. There are many options available to configure how you want your content to appear. Many of these, such as printing, flags, ratings, comments, comment ratings, and social bookmarks work the same way they do in the Web Content Display application.

Show Add Content Button: When selected, this selector adds an Add New button that lets users add new assets directly from the Asset Publisher application. This is checked by default.

Display Template: This selector lets you choose an application display template to customize how the Asset Publisher displays assets. Liferay DXP creates the following display templates for each newly created site, including the default site:

  • Abstracts: This display template shows the first 200-500 characters of the content, defined by the Abstract Length field. This is the default display template of the Asset Publisher.

  • Table: This display template displays the content in an HTML table which can be styled by a theme developer.

  • Title List: This display template displays the content’s title as defined by the user who entered it.

  • Full Content: This display template displays the entire content of the entry.

    There’s also the Rich Summary and Map display templates that belong to the global scope. The Rich Summary template provides a summary view of each asset along with a Read More link to the article’s full content. The Map template displays geolocalized assets in either a Google Map or an Open Street Map provider. The map provider can be configured in Instance Settings, and Site Settings in the Advanced section.

Abstract Length: This selector lets you select the number of characters to display for abstracts. The default is 200.

Asset Link Behavior: The default value is Show Full Content. With this value selected, when the link to an asset is clicked, the full asset is displayed in the current Asset Publisher. (There’s also a View in Context link that shows the article in the Wiki page’s Wiki application.) If the value View in a Context is selected, clicking on an asset causes that asset to be displayed in the application to which the asset belongs. For example, a blog entry would be displayed in the Blogs application where it was created. Likewise, a forum post would be displayed in the Message Boards application where it was created. Similarly, a generic web content article would be displayed in the Asset Publisher of its configured display page. See the section below on display pages for more information.

Number of Items to Display: This selector lets you select the maximum number of assets that can be displayed by the Asset Publisher. If pagination, however, is enabled, there’s no limit to the number of of assets that the Asset Publisher can display. So with pagination enabled, this number represents the maximum number of assets that can be displayed per page.

Pagination Type: This can be set to None, Simple, or Regular. With pagination set to None, the Asset Publisher displays at most the number of assets specified in the Number of Items to Display property. Setting the pagination type to Simple adds Previous and Next buttons that enable the user to browse through pages of assets in the Asset Publisher. Setting the pagination type to Regular adds more options and information including First and Last buttons, a dropdown selector for pages, the number of items per page, and the total number of results (assets being displayed).

Show Metadata Descriptions: This enables Metadata descriptions such as Content Related to… or Content with tag… to be displayed with the published assets.

Show Available Locales: Since content can be localized, you can have different versions of it based on locale. Enabling this option shows the locales available, enabling users to view the content in their language of choice.

Set as the Default Asset Publisher for This Page: The Asset Publisher app is an instanceable app; multiple Asset Publishers can be added to a page and each has an independent configuration. The default Asset Publisher for a page is the one used to display any web content associated with the page.

Enable Conversion To: If you have enabled Liferay’s OpenOffice/LibreOffice integration, you can allow your users to convert the content to one of several formats:

  • DOC

  • ODT

  • PDF

  • RTF

  • SXW

  • TXT

    Please refer to the section on Liferay Server Administration for information on setting up Liferay’s OpenOffice/LibreOffice document conversion functionality.

Enable …: The Asset Publisher’s Display Settings allow you to enable/disable the following options for displayed assets:

  • Print
  • Flags
  • Related Assets
  • Ratings
  • Comments
  • Comment Ratings
  • Social Bookmarks

Enabling the Print option adds a Print link to the full view of an asset displayed in the Asset Publisher. Clicking Print opens a new browser window with a print view of the asset. Enabling flags, related assets, ratings, comments, comment ratings, or social bookmarks add links to the corresponding social features to the view full of the asset in the Asset Publisher.

When enabling social bookmarks, you’re given sub-options to edit the display style of your social bookmarks and whether they are listed at the top or bottom of the Asset Publisher.

Show Metadata: Lets you select various metadata types to be displayed (see below). For example, you can select tags and categories for display. Upon saving your configuration, the Asset Publisher displays tags and categories for each displayed asset. Then users can click on the tags and categories to manually filter the displayed assets.

Figure 3: You can configure the Asset Publisher to display various kinds of metadata about the displayed assets.

Figure 3: You can configure the Asset Publisher to display various kinds of metadata about the displayed assets.

The Display Settings section of the Asset Publisher has numerous options to help you configure how your content selections are displayed to your users. Even though there are many choices, it’s easy to go through the options and quickly adjust the ones that apply to your situation. You’ll want to use the Asset Publisher to query for different kinds of assets in Liferay DXP that contain relevant information for your users.

Configuring Asset Publisher Subscriptions

The Asset Publisher application supports two kinds of subscriptions: RSS subscriptions and email subscriptions. To enable subscriptions, click the Asset Publisher’s Options icon and select Configuration. In the configuration window, open the Subscriptions tab of the Setup tab. There are two options: Enable RSS Subscription and Enable Email Subscription.

Enabling RSS Subscription creates an RSS feed containing links to all of the assets that the Asset Publisher is configured to display. A link to this RSS feed appears at the bottom of the Asset Publisher application. This option is only available when the Dynamic Asset Selection is configured.

Figure 4: When RSS subscriptions have been enabled for an Asset Publisher application, a link to the Asset Publishers RSS feed appears. Users can subscribe to the Asset Publishers RSS feed using their preferred RSS reader.

Figure 4: When RSS subscriptions have been enabled for an Asset Publisher application, a link to the Asset Publisher's RSS feed appears. Users can subscribe to the Asset Publisher's RSS feed using their preferred RSS reader.

Enabling Email Subscription adds a Subscribe link to the Asset Publisher. Users wishing to be notified of newly published assets can click on this link to be added to the subscription list. Liferay DXP periodically checks for new assets and sends emails to subscribed users informing them about the new assets. By default, Liferay performs this check every twenty-four hours.

Next, you’ll look at Display Pages.

Content Display Pages

If you’ve been using Liferay DXP for a while, you might have noticed something about how Liferay DXP handles web content–content is never tied directly to a page. While this can be useful (because it means that you don’t have to recreate content if you want to display the same thing on multiple pages), it also means that you don’t have a static URL for any web content, which is bad for search engine optimization.

As an improvement, Liferay introduced the concept of display pages and canonical URLs. Each web content entry in Liferay has a canonical URL, which is the official location of the content that is referenced any time the content is displayed. A display page can be any page with an asset publisher configured to display any content associated with the page. When adding or editing web content, you can select a display page, but only pages with a configured asset publisher are available for selection.

To create a display page, you can create a page yourself, add an Asset Publisher app, and configure it yourself. Alternatively, you can use the Content Display Page page template included with Liferay DXP. If you’re creating a Display Page manually, once you’ve added an Asset Publisher application to the page, open its configuration window. Then navigate to the Display Settings tab and check the Set as the Default Asset Publisher for This Page box. Also, for its display settings, set the Display Style to Simple and the Asset Link Behavior to View in Context.

You may now be thinking, “Wait, you just told me that each web content item has its own URL, and that this is somehow related to pages where we display a whole bunch of content on the same page?” That’s right. Just watch–create a display page called My Web Content Display Page somewhere in Liferay using the Content Display Page template. Make sure the Inherit Changes selector is not selected. Now, on a different page, add a Web Content Display application. Click the Add button, enter a title and some content, click on Display Page at the right, and select the Display Page you just created. Then click Publish.

Figure 5: You can select a display page for a web content article when creating or editing one.

Figure 5: You can select a display page for a web content article when creating or editing one.

In the Asset Publisher of the My Web Content Display Page, click the Read More link to display the full content. Notice that the canonical URL for content appears in your browser’s address bar. If you create your own custom display page, any additional applications that you place on the page are displayed along with the content when you access it via the canonical URL. If you used the Content Display Page page template for your display page, it not only features a configured Asset Publisher application but also a Tags Navigation, a Categories Navigation, and a Search application. These tools help users to quickly identify relevant content.

Figure 6: A canonical URL for a Lunar Resort Information page would look similar to this screenshot.

Figure 6: A canonical URL for a *Lunar Resort Information* page would look similar to this screenshot.

Next, you’ll learn about publishing RSS feeds.

« Geolocating AssetsPublishing RSS Feeds »
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