Introduction to Web Content Management

Liferay’s Web Content Management system allows non-technical users to publish content to the web without having advanced knowledge of web technology or programming of any sort. Liferay WCM empowers you to publish your content with a simple point and click interface and it helps you to keep your site fresh. You’ll find yourself easily creating, editing and publishing content within just a few minutes of being exposed to its features. But Liferay WCM doesn’t sacrifice power for simplicity. If need be, you can use your developer skills to create complex presentation layer templates that make your content “pop” with dynamic elements. Once these templates have been deployed into the portal, your non-technical users can manage content using these templates as easily as they would manage static content. All of this makes Liferay WCM an appropriate choice both for sites with only a few pages and for sites with gigabytes of content.

Nearly all Liferay users use Liferay’s Web Content Management system (WCM). After all, all every web site has content that needs to be managed. Liferay’s WCM empowers you to manage all the content on your site quickly and easily within your browser. Beyond managing existing content, Liferay’s WCM lets users easily create and manage everything from simple articles containing text and images to fully functional web sites. Web publishing works alongside Liferay Portal’s larger collection of applications, which means you can add shopping cart functionality, visitor polls, web forms, site collaboration tools and more. Everything is done with our collection of easy-to-use tools with familiar rich-text editors and an intuitive interface.

In Liferay, you can create multiple sites within a single portal instance. Each site can have distinct sets of users, content, and application data. Once set up, non-technical users can administer a site. Liferay’s fine-grained permissions system ensures that your content and applications can be accessed only by appropriate sets of users. To manage a site, no programming is required. With Liferay’s WCM, you have the ability to create, edit, stage, approve, and publish content with easy-to-learn yet powerful tools. Liferay’s WCM streamlines the content creation process for end users. It’s much faster to use Liferay’s WCM than it would be to create all the content for your site in HTML. WCM is integrated with Liferay’s services so advanced template developers can use them to query for data stored elsewhere in Liferay. In this chapter, we’ll cover the following topics:

  • Leveraging Liferay’s multi-site capabilities to create and administer sites
  • Creating pages and selecting page types and layout templates
  • Creating and publishing web content
  • Exporting and importing content
  • WCM workflow
  • Site memberships and permissions
  • Page and content permissions

By the time we’re done, you should be able to apply all these concepts to your own content. To demonstrate Liferay’s Web Content Management features, we’ll create and manage content on the portal for the ambitious (and fictitious) Lunar Resort project. The Lunar Resort project specializes in facilitating lunar vacations. It provides space shuttle transportation from the Earth to Moon and back, offers the use of a state-of-the-art recreational facility enclosed by a large, transparent habitat dome, and even rents out lunar rovers. Once you’re familiar with Liferay WCM, you’ll wonder how the Lunar resort’s portal could ever manage without it!

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