Reviewing and Publishing Content

Once content is authored, the next critical steps are reviewing and publishing it. Without proper governance over these stages, inaccurate or inconsistent content can negatively impact your digital solutions. Liferay DXP provides robust review and publishing features so organizations can implement processes that ensure content quality and control.

Liferay Tools for Reviewing and Publishing Content

Content review and publishing is the process of making content available to end users. By default, users can publish content immediately without requiring review, whether structured or in-line. However, Liferay provides a variety of tools and options to govern content releases:

• Workflow: Define approval processes to ensure content quality and accuracy.
• Publications or Staging: Provide working environments for making changes before going live.
• Web Content Date Properties: Schedule when web content is available for use, expires, or requires review.

Together, these tools empower users to govern structured and in-line content releases.

Defining Approval Processes

Ensuring quality and accuracy often requires a review process before content goes public. Liferay's workflow engine is the primary tool for implementing these approval processes. Workflow is highly configurable, allowing organizations to define custom approval chains, such as a simple single-approver process or multi-step reviews involving different roles or departments.

You can associate specific workflows with different applications (e.g., Web Content, Documents and Media, Pages), folders, or even individual content structures or document types. This enables you to tailor processes to the content's nature or team responsibilities. When content enters a workflow, Liferay automatically notifies reviewers, who can then select from available actions and trigger additional automation.

While workflows handle approvals, you can also use it in conjunction with Publications and Staging. This adds an extra layer of review and approval within the publishing environments managed by those tools before content is released to the live site.

Using a Working Environment for Content Changes

When making changes to your digital solution, sometimes it is preferable to make these changes in a way that is entirely isolated from end users viewing your live site. To do this, you can leverage one of Liferay’s publishing tools: Publications or Staging. With these tools, you can safely prepare and review changes to your sites and content before they go live. However, each tool achieves this in different ways.

Staging

Liferay Staging provides a shared working environment for making changes to individual sites and asset libraries before publishing these changes to your live environment. When enabled, Liferay creates a separate copy of the original site or library and hosts them on either the same server (Local Live) or on separate servers (Remote Live).

All editing is then restricted to the staged site or asset library. When ready, you can publish your changes manually or schedule them to publish at a later time. During publishing, the staged changes are exported to the live environment.

Publications

Like Staging, Publications is a change-tracking tool for editing sites and content. However, under the hood, Publications is very different from Staging. Unlike Staging which duplicates content, Publications works with versioned records, using a database column to track changes and determine which version is displayed.

When enabled, contributors can create isolated working environments called ‘publications’. Each publication is company-scoped and can group changes across multiple sites and asset libraries. Also, while Staging provides a single working environment for all team members, Publications allows for multiple independent working environments. This enables contributors to work on their own timelines and publish without impacting other projects. By default, access to a publication is limited to its creator, but they can invite other members and assign them publication-specific roles.

During the publishing process, Liferay checks for conflicts and prompts the user to review and resolve them. Some conflicts can be resolved automatically, while others require manual resolution. Publications maintains a detailed history of published changes, enabling you to quickly revert changes if needed.

Choosing Publications or Staging

Publications is recommended over Staging in nearly all use cases because it provides a superior collaboration experience and greater integration with other Liferay features. The primary exception is if your governance or security requirements necessitate physically separate severs for your production and working environments. Currently, this is only possible with Remote Live staging.

Web Content Date Properties

Liferay also provides date properties for web content to improve ongoing governance. These properties are especially useful for time-sensitive content, such as campaigns, events, or promotions:

• Review Date: Set a date to prompt content review by sending out email notifications. Content administrators can also filter articles by their review date in the Liferay Content Dashboard to manage upcoming reviews.
• Display Page: Control when content becomes visible. You can schedule content to appear at a future date; it is only accessible once the display date is reached.
• Expiry Date: Control when content is no longer displayed. You can schedule retirement for a future date or instantly expire content. You can make expired content visible again by updating this date.

Leveraging these properties supports effective content lifecycle management.

Content Publishing vs Development Staging

When implementing Liferay solutions, most organizations use multiple environments so they can test code (e.g., DEV, TEST, UAT) before deploying it to production (PROD). While these environments are useful for code development, you should not use them for managing content. Content authoring, review, and publishing are all activities that should occur in the PROD environment.

Even when Publications or Staging is enabled, this is still within the PROD environment. This is because content creation is not a development activity. Understanding this principle is critical for effective content governance, as forcing content creators to author content in a non-production environment before migrating it simply creates complexity. Liferay’s content publishing tools provide the right level of governance for any organization within the Production environment context.

Clarity’s review and publishing needs

While building their public websites, Clarity seeks to improve governance and compliance by implementing clear processes for content review, approval, and lifecycle management. As such, they can clearly benefit from using Workflow to review their content authors submissions.

Clarity also sees value in having a way of previewing approved content before it is made live. Since they don’t require separate servers for their working and production environments, they plan to leverage Publications.

Conclusion

Liferay provides a comprehensive suite of tools for governing the content lifecycle from review through controlled publishing. By strategically leveraging these features, you can implement robust governance models that help to ensure only high-quality, accurate content reaches your audience.

Next, learn how you can use sites, pages, and navigation menus as part of your content management strategy.