How much did you hear about the new Liferay Headless CMS?

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Soon in our 2025 Q4 release we will have its beta version, when you try, please share feedback with us so we can keep improving.

4 Answers

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Looking forward to it @Luiz_Jardim! I’ve started the Content Manager Learning Path to help prepare for it.

This is great to hear, this learning path is about our current one, once the new is out, please try it out and also share with us your feedback. We should also soon release a learning path about how to leverage the new CMS that is coming.

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Hi @Luiz_Jardim ,

I had a quick look at the new Headless CMS from the last Q release, and here are my initial observations:

  • Home - Very good idea!

    • The Recent Assets is something that content editors use very often (in classic CMS it was a “Recent” filter).
    • I think it would be beneficial also to have a new tab My Content (assets I authored or edited), as most users return to update the contents they created earlier.
    • I also hope that the Quick Actions menu will be configurable per user - usually, different users deal with different types of content. Otherwise, it’s not very useful. For example, on our main site, we don’t use any of the displayed Asset Types except Vocabularies, but even they are not created by regular editors.
    • My Workflow Tasks fit here very well; our users complain a lot that they can’t find their workflow tasks in the current CMS.

  • Dashboard, especially the Inventory Analysis. Our customer asked us recently for a similar feature (content and publication analytics), so this dashboard seems to fit this requirement perfectly.

  • Assets

    • I like the three tabs: All, Contents and Files; but it seems that the old division between Files and Web Contents is still there (you can create folders only within Contents and Files), while All is just an ordered list of all assets, without any structure. I think it would be great to have it the other way around, so the Editors can combine articles and related documents in a single folder instead of having to use two different repositories. That would streamline the content creation workflow as well: I noticed that our editors usually upload related documents or images while they’re editing the article. Currently, because of how it’s uploaded from the Web Content editor, most of these resources end up in the root folder, causing a huge mess. If we had the articles and documents in a single repo, the resources could be uploaded to the Article’s folder by default.
    • Articles:
      • The new comments section is cool. In the past, I had to create a dedicated structure field for that. It would be great to be able to comment on specific structure fields as well (for larger structures)
      • The categories have no Vocabularies listed, which will be a problem for larger taxonomies. In our case, for example, we have a Theme vocabulary that stores all the main “topics“, but we also use Vocabulary Series, which contains names of series of our publications (attached just to some of the articles). The categories from both vocabularies can have similar names, but do not mean the same, and serve different purposes. I’m sure that people will be confused by the unified list.
      • There is no way to preview the article in a Display Page - very important! We got this feature not so long ago (2-3 years), and it would be a pity to lose it again :slight_smile:
      • There is no Related Assets option from the current CMS. That is used quite often for linking related articles together.
    • Documents
      • I don’t see the document preview, but I assume it will be added in one of the next releases.

That’s it for now, but certainly I’ll try to provide more feedback as I find more time for testing. Thank you for sharing your work on the new features. The change you’re working on now happens once in many years (actually, that’s the first time in Liferay’s history that the CMS is revamped to that extent), so I think it’s a great opportunity to make it really a great and user-friendly product.

Thanks,

KG

Thanks for the feedback, they are very vauable to us! 1. About quick actions being specific for each user is interesting and makes sense. 2. About having folders that support both content and files, this is an interesting discussion that we are open for hearing more feedback about. 3. The preview for documents is coming indeed. 4. The categories have no Vocabularies listed, this was a limitation in the component that we are solving already. 5. There is no way to preview the article in a Display Page, this is also coming soon.

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About related assets, could you share the use case you use related assets for? We are open to understand better its usage.

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We usually use two ways to link the contents with each other. I'll show examples on our main public site, but the same idea applies to other sites. First, they can share the same categories or tags so they're visible on a category display page (e.g. https://www.ifad.org/en/v/48664163) or in the Keep Exploring section below the article (e.g. https://www.ifad.org/en/w/opinions/rural-investment-builds-a-promising-future-at-home). I'm out of characters so I'll continue below...

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But sometimes, our editors need to explicitly link articles or documents with each other, so the Keep Exploring section contains exactly what they need. For example, in https://www.ifad.org/en/w/opinions/rural-futures-in-focus-papua-new-guinea or https://www.ifad.org/en/w/explainers/driving-rural-economic-growth-in-the-pacific. These articles are linked explicitly via the Related Assets mechanism.

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Some really exciting stuff to see! We can appreciate some of the new flexibility this may offer. Just a few comments in the meantime.

SEO Concern Since the content can be shared with many locations, we love to manage (per content item, or per space) … which destination site is the “canonical” for the content item(s).

Java API (?) We are hopeful that the objects can be accessed using a more direct Java API without needing to make a network request over REST in order to work with the data. We assume ObjectEntryService etc. will be the way… but just wanted to check. Looking forward!

Thanks for the feedback, those are valid points for us to consider.

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Hi Luiz, since the new CMS has already been released under the Release Flag, I guess we can start evaluating the feature and using it for new POCs. Can we also start opening the Support Tickets?

Yes, now this feature is fully supported and you can start projects leveraging it and opening tickets to our support in case if you find any strange behaviors.

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