The latest version of Liferay DXP delivers powerful tools to help businesses create and personalize any experience across their solutions, leverage the flexibility of a decoupled CMS architecture, and streamline business operations.
Liferay DXP meets the needs of today’s digital-first business teams to create experiences rapidly across channels. It equips enterprises with a wide variety of easy-to-use applications and tools to build tailored solutions and experiences on a flexible platform.
For a full feature list, please read the Liferay DXP 7.2 Features Overview or contact sales@liferay.com.
Key New Features
Ensure your business evolves and stays relevant with new features designed to support great customer experiences across all stages of the customer journey.
Experience Creation
Great digital experiences are imperative in today’s competition for new business. Companies also need to make sure they stay relevant after the sale, investing in long-term customer relationships that cultivate loyalty and repeat business. Here are some new features to help you ensure you’re creating and delivering excellent experiences all the time.
Content Authoring
Liferay DXP 7.2 evolves our content authoring and management capabilities significantly, making it even easier and more intuitive for the non-technical content creator to create and manage engaging content.
Figure 1: Content authors can build pages out of building blocks called *Fragments*.
Site Building
Content pages now allow users to create experiences that have both applications and content on the same page, giving businesses increased flexibility to create experiences tailored to fit the needs of different end users. More tools have been provided to allow for richer layouts and functionality for the non-technical user to build a visually appealing site experience easily.
Fragments
This release expands on the functionality available to create fragments, which previously required developer involvement. For marketers looking to create a fragment for their use case, we provide new functionality that allows a non-technical user to create simple fragments easily through the page editor itself by dragging and dropping out-of-the-box components into a container.
Figure 2: Fragments make it easy to build pages.
Fragments Toolkit/CLI
Improvements to the web developer’s experience has also been made for Liferay DXP 7.2. A set of front-end toolkits—including a CLI tool—is provided so web developers can write fragments in their own code editors and import/export them without needing to redeploy.
Figure 3: Use the Fragments Editor or download the toolkit and use your own tools.
In-Context Editing and Content Previews
An improved site building interface shows users how different content would appear to different visitors. Liferay DXP allows content creators to preview content in context of how it would look like on a live site.
Content Usages
For structured content that can be mapped and delivered across multiple locations, a new feature has been introduced to allow the content creator to view where specific pieces of web content are being used and reused across their channels.
A/B Testing (DXP only)
Content creators can use A/B testing to create and customize tests to evaluate which elements on Content Pages perform better and edit content accordingly. Liferay DXP’s A/B tests leverage Bayesian statistics to identify the probable values of lift for a variant, allowing your business to make more informed decisions. Native integration with Liferay Analytics Cloud allows for data collected for the running test to determine a winning variant.
Personalization
In Liferay DXP 7.2, segmentation and personalization capabilities have been moved into the core product. This allows for a more seamless integration of content creation and personalization functionality and helps streamline the process of creating segments while creating personalized experiences.
Session Rules
There are many different pieces of information available to track a web visitor. Session rules help further identify their distinct digital fingerprint per visit and is something that marketers can leverage to identify who is a repeat visitor and who is a new visitor.
Rule Builder
Being able to sort intelligently through vast amounts of data and associated individuals can be tedious; this process should be easy and not have to be curated manually. Marketers should instead be able to build lists of individuals based on a specific set of criteria using rules, leading to time savings and efficiency. The rule builder helps enable more effective targeting by reducing the amount of manual work needed to create a specific list of people who fall under certain pieces of criteria.
Figure 4: The Rule Builder provides a drag-and-drop interface that helps you build exactly the criteria you need to target the right information to the right users.
Content Sets
Content sets help address the use case of personalizing a feed of content for different groups of people. Users can easily target and personalize multiple pieces of content in a fragment or widget and have it display accordingly for the visitor.
Experiences
The new Experiences feature allows a user to create different variations of a page. All the tools available for creating a page in the layout editor are also available for making these page variations. Non-technical users can easily tailor the messaging, images and even widgets on a page.
Content Recommendations (DXP only)
Content recommendations leverages interest models generated in Liferay Analytics Cloud to recommend content on Liferay DXP. The option to do so is available through Content Sets and automatically filters content based on interest keywords. Liferay Analytics Cloud uses AI to cluster topics and model long-term interest for known and unknown visitors. Keywords are taken from the categories, tags, and keywords of content.
Bulk Management
Enterprises regularly manage large volumes of content and work that gets generated on their digital properties. The need to manage and accurately categorize these assets can be overwhelming, if not impossible, to maintain and use. Bulk management features provided in Liferay DXP 7.2 help reduce the amount of manual labor through automation and tools that perform bulk actions.
Auto-Tagging
Users can automatically assign the correct metadata for images, documents and web content. Having rich metadata assigned to the proper content helps to not only reduce the amount of manual, tedious work, but also improves the searchability of assets. The resulting metadata that accumulates helps establish the foundation needed for content personalization efforts and content automation. An Auto-Tagging API lets developers extend the functionality to tag any asset with any selected auto-tagging service.
Bulk Operations
Improvements have been made to make the experience of managing tags, categories, and file operations much easier at scale.
Automatic Document Versioning Policies
Refinements to how documents can be versioned are provided in 7.2. The functionality for document versioning has been expanded to let users define their own versioning policies and apply them to Liferay DXP. This is in addition to the existing default versioning system Liferay DXP provides out-of-the-box.
Business Operations
Digital enterprises today must possess efficient back office organization to support the delivery of great customer experiences. It is crucial to fulfill these customer interactions and ensure those experiences are delivered and supported in a timely manner. Achieving this kind of efficiency, for a great customer experience, requires involvement from different departments and stakeholders and affects a lot of disparate content and processes. Liferay DXP 7.2 helps enterprises navigate these problems with features to help support streamlining and optimizing those processes and operations.
Forms API
Reduce the time it takes for IT to deliver custom applications for the business. Automate data collection through applications.
Workflow Metrics
Workflow metrics helps users gain insight into how long certain workflow events take to complete. Users can set deadlines on a workflow process’s events; these configurations are called Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Once defined, use Workflow Reports to measure compliance with the SLAs. The analytics and metrics generated can help you understand the throughput performance of your processes in a given timeframe, allowing users to better optimize their processes.
Workflow Reports
Cut down the time it takes to serve your customers. New reports for workflow processes help users identify operational bottlenecks and work efficiently to increase revenue goals.
Online Document Editing
Integration with Office 365 and Google Docs allows the creation and editing of documents stored in Liferay DXP. Users can manage documents, presentations, and spreadsheets with the power that the suite provides and store them in Liferay DXP’s document repository for future access. This feature takes advantage of the existing permissions system, versioning, and sharing capabilities already included with Liferay DXP 7.2.
P2P Asset Sharing
In addition to being able to create and edit documents easily, users can now comment and share documents with other registered users. This allows for faster coordination without the need of assigning custom permissions.
Figure 5: You can share assets with other users easily.
Improved Identity Management Tools
New improvements have also been made to help tackle tedious tasks of handling personal data erasure requests. Logical hierarchies for assets are now in place to help simplify bulk deletion and anonymization during the review process. Filtering and scoping capabilities across Liferay DXP help provide greater context when reviewing personal data, and administrators can be informed when specific applications will delete or anonymize data during the auto-anonymization process. All of these improvements help ensure compliance with GDPR and other data protection laws.
Headless Capabilities
Give your developers the freedom to create any presentation layer and content creators the ease of traditional content management tools. Liferay DXP 7.2 provides a decoupled architecture to allow for a range of approaches towards content management and delivery. Enterprises can choose a traditional CMS or experience management approach, a full headless approach or a hybrid approach.
OpenAPI
Liferay’s API layer supports the OpenAPI specification, the most popular open source framework for REST APIs. This allows for greater flexibility, security and ease of integration as the OpenAPI specification is language-agnostic, allows for security audits, and clients can understand and consume services without knowledge of server implementation or access to the server code.
Headless CMS
Enable developers to manage web content headlessly. Headless capabilities in this version are also provided to help enable omnichannel experiences from a single source of data. Content delivery APIs allow for developers to deliver richer, faster and more responsive user experiences, no matter the device. Front-end developers can leverage their native tools and frameworks they’re already familiar with to build sites. These APIs provide access to a variety of assets and content in Liferay DXP.
Content participation APIs are also provided to support user interactions with comments and ratings for web content and assets.
Developer Experience
In addition to the new headless capabilities that are provided on Liferay DXP 7.2, improvements to developer tools and the developer experience has been made. These tools help developers accelerate time to market and tailor the platform for your business needs.
Upgrade Tool
A revamped Upgrade Tool simplifies the upgrade process from previous versions of Liferay DXP. This all-in-one tool allows system administrators to reduce the time spent troubleshooting by helping them plan their upgrade process for database migrations, checking properties, and restarting failed upgrades.
Front-end Toolkits
Front-end toolkits allow developers to create an application using their favorite JavaScript framework. The toolkit resolves any conflicting JavaScript packages and bundles the application properly to deploy it into Liferay DXP seamlessly.
Struts Removed
Though Liferay DXP never used a version of Struts with security vulnerabilities, the Struts library has been removed, and it is no longer a part of the product.
What’s Next
Learn more about how Liferay can help your business take the next step in your digital strategy. Request a demo from one of our team members at liferay.com/request-a-demo.