Authoring Structured Content

Web content structures guide the authoring process by ensuring all necessary information is captured in a consistent and predictable way. This is key to creating reusable, scalable, and well-governed content. This lesson explores the practical steps of authoring structured content in Liferay. You'll learn best practices for creating new content articles and managing their lifecycle with features like versioning, scheduling, and localization.

Creating Content Articles

Structured content is authored in a dedicated administrative UI separate from site pages. During this process, content authors select a predefined structure and fill in all relevant fields included in that structure. This goes beyond just writing text and includes adding images, documents, and metadata such as tags and categories. Also, by organizing articles effectively during the authoring process, you can improve the discoverability and long-term maintainability of your content.

When selecting a structure, you should avoid using the default Basic Web Content structure. Instead, you should use specialized structures that serve a specific purpose. This focuses each item and helps you provide the correct information. This is especially important when designing displays for content.

For example, if you’re creating content items for a promotional banner, its design likely includes a button that leads users to a specific URL. Instead of hard-coding these values in the page itself, you can use a structure that includes fields for these values. You can then map these fields to a button fragment or create templates that use these fields to render the button. You’ll learn more about these and other display considerations in Module 4.

Beyond these basics, the authoring process is supported by several powerful features. For global audiences, you can localize content into multiple languages. Additionally, the web content UI includes tools for managing versions, permissions, and scheduling.

Localizing Structured Content

To reach audiences across multiple countries, you can localize your content into any of the 50+ languages Liferay provides OOTB. Liferay provides several options for doing this:

• Translate content manually through the web content UI.
• Export and import XLIFF files for external translation agencies.
• Integrate with AI-based services to automate translations (e.g., Amazon Translate, DeepL, Google Cloud Translation, Microsoft Translator).

If needed, administrators can extend Liferay’s list of supported languages. 

Liferay provides granular control over who can manage translations through the UI. Users with general Edit permissions can update or add translations directly to web content. Alternatively, you can assign specialized roles that grant users the Translate permission for specific languages only. This empowers local translators to do their work without requiring full access to the content.

Furthermore, you can set dedicated approval processes to the translation process. For example, submitting a new translation triggers a workflow and assigns a review task to a designated content manager for approval.

Ultimately, localized content expands your market reach, strengthens your brand presence, and delivers culturally relevant experiences that build trust. By streamlining translation management, you lay a strong foundation for your global growth.

Managing and Evolving Structured Content

Effectively managing content after it has been created is key to maintaining its accuracy and relevance. Liferay provides several features directly in the authoring UI to manage the content lifecycle.

• Versioning: Whenever you publish changes to a web content article, Liferay automatically creates a new version. This helps you preserve a complete audit trail for published changes and enables you to revert content to a previous state if needed. As such, versioning is crucial for collaborative environments and for correcting mistakes.

• Scheduling: Instead of publishing content immediately, you can schedule it to go live at a future date and time. This feature also enables you to set an expiration date, ensuring time-sensitive content like campaigns and announcements is automatically removed from your site without manual effort.

• Workflows: For content that requires a formal review before publication, you can implement approval processes using Liferay's workflow engine. A workflow defines the specific steps and user roles required for an item to be approved, which helps maintain quality standards and clarifies responsibilities among authors and editors. To learn more about designing and implementing workflows, consider taking the Mastering Liferay Publishing Tools and the Content Lifecycle course.

• Related Assets: While authoring web content articles, you can link them to other resources using the Related Assets feature. For example, you can link your article on a new product directly to its downloadable PDF user manual in Documents and Media. This enriches the user experience by providing relevant, supplementary information. It also helps create logical pathways between your content and assets that go beyond the site's main navigation.

Using these tools together ensures your content remains accurate, relevant, and well-governed throughout its lifecycle.

Best Practices for Authoring Content

Applying these best practices during the authoring process can help long-term maintailability and ensure your content meets display requirements.

• Using Specialized Structures: You should use specialized structures for individual types of scriptures and avoid over using the generic Basic Web Content structure.

• Adding Metadata: Metadata adds context to your content and improves discoverability, even if it isn’t directly visible to site users. Use categories and tags to support filtering, search, and dynamic publishing with collections. This makes your content easier to manage and more relevant at scale.

• Using Clear Names: Use clear, consistent names for your articles. Avoid vague titles like "newcontent1" and instead choose descriptive names such as "2025-Q3-Product-Overview." Well-named articles are easier to locate and help generate clean, friendly URLs that improve visibility in search engines.

• Using Clear Folder Structures: In addition to using clear article names, you should group items into a clear logical folder structure (e.g., “Marketing > Events > 2025”). Folders not only organize related content but also let you enforce specific structures, apply workflows, and manage permissions more effectively.

• Customizing Friendly URLs: Customize friendly URLs when creating content to improve usability and SEO. While Liferay generates URLs from article titles by default, setting them intentionally ensures they remain meaningful and easy for site visitors and editors to navigate.

• Authoring for Accessibility: Ensure you your content is accessible for everyone by following WCAG guidelines when creating content. This includes using proper semantic structures (e.g., for headers, ordered/unordered lists), adding descriptive alt text for images, and creating meaningful link texts. When displaying content, you can Liferay’s Page Audit tool to help identify accessibility issues. You’ll learn more about this tool in Module 4.

Following these practices helps ensure your content stays flexible, reusable, and easy to manage as your site grows.

Clarity’s Authoring Process

Clarity plans to use web content structures for authoring all of their reusable content, including promotional banners and informational articles. For example, they want to create a call-to-action announcement and carousel banner to encourage users to visit their catalog and explore popular eyewear. Clarity also wants to create FAQs to improve customer self-service.

By leveraging web content, they can ensure their content items are reusable across multiple pages and support formal review workflows. Additionally, they can use well-defined taxonomies and folder structures to ensure their web content is organized effectively. With this strategy, Clarity can create flexible, specialized content for their public website.

Conclusion

Authoring structured web content takes place in a dedicated administrative UI, separate from the pages where it is displayed. This UI provides a variety of tools for different aspects of content authoring and management, from versioning and scheduling to localization.

Next, you’ll author web content for Clarity.