Liferay DXP’s Web Content Management (WCM) 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 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. Liferay WCM, however, 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 Liferay DXP, 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 DXP’s Web Content Management system. After all, every web site has content that needs to be managed. Liferay DXP’s WCM empowers you to manage all the content on your site quickly and easily within your browser. Beyond managing existing content, Liferay DXP’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 DXP’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.
Liferay DXP’s WCM offers a host of features that makes managing the content of your site easier. A list is provided below of some of the tools that can be used with web content in Liferay. Some of these tools are covered in other chapters of the User’s Guide, so links are provided if you’re interested in using them to manage your site’s web content.
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WYSIWYG Editor: A complete HTML editor that allow you to modify fonts, add color, insert images, and much more.
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Structure Editor: Easily add and remove fields you want available to content creators and then dynamically move them around. This editor includes an entire suite of form controls you can drag and drop onto your structure.
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Template Editor: Import template script files or create your own template that informs the system how to display the content within the fields determined by the structure.
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Web Content Display: An application that lets you place web content on a page in your site.
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Asset Publisher: An application which can aggregate different types of content together in one view. This app is covered in more detail in the Publishing Assets section.
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Scheduler: Lets you schedule when content is reviewed, displayed and removed. This feature is covered in more detail in the Scheduling Web Content Publication section.
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Workflow Integration: Run your content through an approval or review process. This feature is covered in more detail in the Using Workflow section.
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Staging: Use a separate staging server or stage your content locally so you can keep your changes separate from the live site. This feature is covered in more detail in the Using the Staging Environment section.
With Liferay DXP’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.
By the time you’re done, you’ll be able to apply all these concepts to your own content. To demonstrate Liferay DXP’s Web Content Management features, you’ll create and manage content on Liferay 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 the 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 instance could ever manage without it!