Since Liferay has moved away from using themes and towards a modular approach of master pages, style books, and client extensions, we are thinking of reworking our current theme to follow the modern approach.
While most of our customizing can be replicated through client extensions, I am struggling to understand how to apply master pages in a maintainable way.
As background information, due to the structure of our organization, we have a large amount of different sites and sub-sites managed by separate teams of moderators. They currently all use our custom theme, which provides the default layout for each page, as well as multiple page and site templates. As these are embedded in the theme, changes to them can be applied globally to all existing sites via a deployment.
As far as I understand, this is however not natively possible with master pages. They cannot be created on the Global site, they have to be manually exported and imported per site, and changes also don’t apply globally. Site initializer client extensions also do nothing to make master pages more maintainable on existing sites.
I assume it is possible to automatically propagate changes through the headless API, but that also would be a custom solution requiring implementation and testing on our end.
Am I misunderstanding master pages and “themeless” architecture?
Our current version is DXP 2025.Q1, but we have no problem updating to the next LTS if that helps with anything.