Storing and Securing Design Assets

Liferay's asset framework provides tools for displaying and interacting with any type of content or data. This makes it a foundational aspect of designing and developing web solutions. Before you begin building page components and site templates, you should ensure your content is stored securely and convenient to access. Leveraging the asset framework effectively enables full integration with other platform features and unlocks the full potential of Liferay's design elements.

As an eyewear company with a global presence, Clarity manages multiple websites for different regions and brands. These sites share marketing assets like videos and banners. Reusing these assets is crucial both for consistency and for enforcing governance and compliance requirements by ensuring only approved and licensed assets are used. To effectively manage their diverse design needs, Clarity needs a unified, secure interface for storing their assets.

Determining Where to Store Assets

Liferay provides several asset storage options, each with unique considerations: site, global site, asset library, and external storage. When choosing an option, it's important to evaluate your business requirements, for example:

• Asset Reuse: Determine how frequently and across how many sites assets need to be shared.
• Access Control: Determine how users need to access your assets and what restrictions apply.
• Scalability: Assess the expected growth in asset volume and complexity.

By evaluating these factors, you can ensure you select the most suitable asset storage strategy for your organization.

Using Site Storage

You can store your assets directly in your site implementation. While this is the most straightforward approach, it scopes your design assets to the individual site. This limits reusability and scalability. To reuse an asset from your site in another location, you must create a separate copy of that asset. This is not only an inefficient use of storage space, but it also limits how much your solution can scale.

For every new site that needs to share existing assets, you duplicate the effort of adding and editing those assets, a manual process that introduces more opportunities for error and inconsistency into your design workflow. For these reasons, Liferay does not recommend storing assets at the site level except for testing or one-off scenarios.

Using Global Site Storage

To address site storage limitations, Liferay also provides the global site. Assets in the global site are automatically available everywhere in your instance. This simplifies asset reuse and reduces duplication. For an organization like Clarity with multiple websites, using the global site to share assets is a tempting option. However, this approach introduces significant security risks.

Once stored in the global site, assets cannot be restricted to individual sites. For this reason, global site storage is only a stopgap solution and not a viable long-term plan for an organization with multiple channels and brands across various regions.

Using External Storage

Organizations that need to integrate with external systems may consider storing their design assets outside of Liferay entirely. With the introduction of client extensions, this approach is now a viable alternative. To learn more about using client extensions for your design solutions, take the Foundations of Liferay Client Extensions and Mastering Liferay Frontend Client Extensions courses.

While the above storage methods have their time and place, Liferay recommends asset libraries as the preferred choice for storing and securing design assets.

Centralizing Design Assets with Asset Libraries

Asset libraries offer a centralized, collaborative space for managing design assets. Every asset library exists at the instance level, so you can connect it to any number of sites and manage user access independent of site membership. Any changes to library assets are automatically propagated to all usages, significantly reducing duplicate effort and manual errors. This enhances time-to-market by creating a single source of truth for all asset consumers.

Asset libraries work seamlessly with other platform applications. This includes taxonomies, workflows, staging, and more. Using asset libraries for design assets is the best way to ensure that your Liferay solutions are future-proof and maintainable.

Additionally, these libraries offer superior security for storing design assets. Like other platform applications, they leverage Liferay's robust role-based access control system. However, asset libraries provide an added layer of security and management through configurable memberships and library-specific roles. These features offer enhanced access control and granularity compared to other asset storage methods, though without sacrificing flexibility or limiting collaboration.

Conclusion

Though Liferay offers several storage options, asset libraries are the optimal choice for managing design assets within Liferay. They enhance workflow consistency and collaboration, while providing scalability for future organizational growth. For global enterprises like Clarity, asset libraries are the ideal choice for secure and efficient asset management.

Next, you'll help Clarity create and configure a library for distributor-specific assets.