Storing Digital Assets and Content

A key part of your content management strategy involves deciding where to store your digital assets and content within Liferay DXP. The location you choose—whether within specific Sites or shared Asset Libraries—has significant implications for content reuse, access control, security, and long-term maintainability. This article explores Liferay's primary content storage options, helping you select the best approach based on your strategic requirements.

Determining Where to Store Assets and Content

Before creating content in Liferay, it's essential to understand the different 'spaces' where you can store and manage that content. Liferay offers several options, and your choice directly affects the scope of your content and how users can access it. The two primary storage options are custom sites and asset libraries.

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.

Site and Global Site Storage

Liferay sites are containers for building digital experiences, such as websites, intranets, e-commerce storefronts, or portals. Sites contain pages, navigation structures, and configurations that define that unique user-facing experience. You can also create and manage content in sites. While this approach to storage is simple and straightforward, it scopes your content to individual sites, limiting its potential for reuse across other areas of your Liferay instance. In multi-site organizations requiring shared content, site storage inevitably causes data duplication, increased maintenance, and greater risk of inconsistency. For these reasons, Liferay recommends against storing reusable assets at the site level; reserve site storage for truly site-specific content or temporary testing.

Liferay also provides the Global site. Content stored in the global site is automatically available across your instance. While this simplifies asset reuse and reduces duplication, this approach introduces significant security risks. Once stored in the global site, you cannot restrict access on a per-site basis. Due to this lack of granular control, Liferay discourages using the Global site to store your web content. Instead, you should use asset libraries.

Asset Library Storage

Asset libraries are dedicated spaces for creating and managing reusable content with the Web Content and Documents and Media applications. These libraries exist at the instance level, so you can connect it to any number of sites and manage user access independent of site membership. This is ideal for managing centralized brand assets or any content that needs to be maintained in one place but used in many. Any changes library content are automatically propagated to all usages, significantly reducing duplicate effort and manual errors.

Beyond Web Content and Documents and Media, asset libraries work seamlessly with other content management tools. This includes taxonomies, workflows, staging, and more. Using asset libraries for content is the best way to ensure that your Liferay solutions are future-proof and maintainable.

Like other platform applications, asset libraries leverage Liferay's robust role-based access control system. However, asset libraries provide an added layer of security and management through configurable membership and library-specific roles. These features offer enhanced access control and granularity compared to Global site storage, though without sacrificing flexibility or limiting collaboration.

While site storage has its time and place, Liferay recommends asset libraries as the preferred choice for storing and securing both content and assets.

External Storage

Liferay also provides configuration options for storing digital assets externally and integrating with external systems. These external storage options primarily apply to binary files managed via Documents and Media or assets managed in external DAMs. While configuring external storage connections is typically handled by System Administrators or development teams, awareness of these capabilities is beneficial for strategic planning. See File Store Types and Documents and Media DevOps to learn more.

Storing Clarity’s Content and Assets

Given Clarity's need to deliver consistent content across multiple sites and to diverse global audiences (like customers and distributors), they should primarily leverage asset libraries. This approach enables them to centrally manage reusable content such as product specifications, marketing materials, and core support documentation, ensuring consistency and enabling granular access control independent of specific sites.

Site storage would then be reserved only for content that is truly unique to a particular site or experience, avoiding the pitfalls of duplication and inconsistency associated with storing shared assets within sites or the Global site (which lacks necessary permission controls for Clarity's distinct audiences). Using asset libraries provides the essential foundation for Clarity's requirements regarding reuse, governance, and scalability.

Conclusion

Choosing the right storage option for your solution is a crucial first step in implementing effective and maintainable Liferay content solutions. By carefully evaluating your requirements for reuse, access control, and scalability against the capabilities of each option, you establish a solid foundation for your content. Understanding these storage principles prepares you for the next step: modeling your specific content types.

Next, you’ll learn how to model your content in Liferay.