Need to duplicate / reuse Collections in Content Publisher to avoid repetitive configuration

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Hi everyone,

I would like to share a recurring functional need we are facing when working with Collections in Content Publisher in Liferay DXP, and get feedback from the community or the product team.

At the moment, Collections cannot be copied or duplicated. They always have to be created from scratch, even when only a single criterion (such as a category or a tag) needs to be changed.

This becomes a significant productivity issue in very common scenarios.
Hi everyone,

I would like to share a recurring functional need we are facing when working with Collections in Content Publisher in Liferay DXP, and get feedback from the community or the product team.

At the moment, Collections cannot be copied or duplicated. They always have to be created from scratch, even when only a single criterion (such as a category or a tag) needs to be changed.

This becomes a significant productivity issue in very common scenarios.

Use case 1: Similar pages within a site

  • We have a page with several Content Publishers configured using Collections.

  • We need to create another page with the same structure, where the displayed content only differs by a category or a tag.

  • We copy the existing page.

Current behavior:

  • New Collections must be created for each Content Publisher.

  • The existing Collection configuration must be manually replicated.

  • Only the category or tag is changed.

  • Each Content Publisher must then be reconfigured to point to the new Collection.

Previously, when using Content Publishers based on filters, it was enough to modify the criteria directly in the portlet.

Use case 2: Content Publisher configuration templates

  • A Content Publisher configuration template is based on a Collection.

  • A new Content Publisher is created using that template, and only the category or tag needs to be changed.

Current behavior:

  • The existing Collection cannot be reused.

  • A new Collection must be created, almost identical to the original one.

  • The new Content Publisher must be linked to that new Collection.

    Proposal:

    A simple “Duplicate / Clone Collection” option would greatly improve productivity and maintainability in these scenarios.

    Thanks in advance.

I also support this proposal. Not being able to duplicate Collections forces us to recreate them unnecessarily, even for minimal changes. A simple “Duplicate / Clone Collection” option would greatly streamline our workflows.

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Our pages share the same structure; only the content category changes. This category is defined in the collection, along with other settings we wouldn’t need to modify if collections could be duplicated. Instead of creating pages, portlets, and collections manually, we could copy the page, duplicate the collections, and only update the category in the duplicated collection, and the collection in the portlets.

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I also spent a lot of time creating almost identical collections (just the category changed), so I vote for this one as well.

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1 Answer

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Thank you @csanchez for the detailed post. I’m going to link it to Jira and consider when planning the next epics.

In the case of having a unique category per page it would be nice to define one collection, but then have the collection pick up categories from chosen vocabularies that are set on the page. That way the collection is reusable, but dynamic. Perhaps the Category display page template would already do this but I don’t think it does in 2025 Q1 anyway

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