Understanding the Liferay Content Lifecycle

Liferay provides a comprehensive suite of out-of-the-box features and capabilities that support every stage of the content lifecycle. Additionally, Liferay's intuitive UI enables all users, regardless of technical ability, to access and leverage these features. Generally, the tools you use will vary based on your organization's requirements or the specific needs of your use case.

Stages of Liferay’s Content Lifecycle

The content lifecycle involves a dynamic flow of activities where stages don't always proceed linearly; some are ongoing processes, and others require frequent revisits. Each stage presents unique management challenges and opportunities for effective governance.

Planning and Creating

This initial phase encompasses planning content objectives, identifying target audiences, and strategizing content display and access permissions. A common bottleneck is insufficient upfront planning, which often leads to content misalignment and re-work. Failing to thoroughly identify your content requirements can lead to inconsistency and missed requirements, which generally requires refactoring and leads to inefficient processes.

After planning, the creation stage involves implementing the content plan by defining content structures, document types, and taxonomies, as well as populating the content itself. Ensuring consistency and adherence to guidelines during content input often presents a challenge. This is because multiple contributors might interpret guidelines differently, or a lack of standardized processes can lead to varied quality and format.

Liferay Tools for Planning and Creating

Liferay provides web content structures and document types to define custom fields for structured data. These determine your core content fields and help ensure consistent data collection. If you require custom data models with more unique requirements, Liferay Objects provides a low-code solution that’s integrated with Liferay’s core frameworks. In addition to defining structures for your data, you can also wireframe your page structures using master page templates, content pages, and display page templates.

For content input, you can leverage applications like Web Content, Documents and Media, and Tags and Categories. Authors can access these applications to create content within sites and asset libraries. Additionally, because of Liferay’s robust headless framework, you can leverage APIs to create and import content. When you build pages, you can also use fragments to add inline content directly in pages.

Reviewing, Approving, and Publishing

Content quality and accuracy are paramount, making the reviewing and approving stages critical. Content undergoes scrutiny by assigned users or teams. Delays can arise if approval processes are unclear or if multiple reviews are required. This necessitates clear processes and efficient workflows to ensure content moves smoothly towards publication.

Once approved, publishing makes content available to end users for use (e.g., displaying it on websites, enabling users to download it, using it in other applications). So, it is crucial to define processes that ensure only reviewed and approved content is published, and that it's only accessible to the appropriate users.

Liferay Tools for Reviewing, Approving, and Publishing

Liferay provides comprehensive tools for managing content review, approval, and publishing. To begin with, you can define and implement content approval processes using Liferay’s highly configurable workflow engine. Within workflows, you can define specific tasks with associated actions and automated notifications for reviewers, ensuring content moves through defined stages with the proper level of visibility. Additionally, web content includes review, publish, and expiration dates that you can use to automate review notifications and govern content availability.

For managing the final release of content and site changes, Liferay offers Publications and Staging. These tools provide separate working environments for preparing and reviewing changes before they go live. Publications offers multiple working environments that separate teams can use to group changes across multiple sites and asset libraries. This enables parallel workstreams for content and site updates. Staging provides a single, shared working environment for individuals sites or asset libraries. This is the go to choice when you need physically separate servers for your working and live environments. You’ll explore each tool in a later module.

Displaying and Optimizing

Once content is published, displaying it makes it visible to end users. This process is closely tied to publishing, but how content is displayed can vary independently of the content itself. You can display content items or assets in a variety of ways on your website or across different channels. Deciding how to present your content and configuring it for display is a critical part of this stage. Some challenges include ensuring consistent presentation and adapting content display for different devices or user contexts.

Yet once your content is displayed, that’s not the end of the process. Optimizing involves monitoring content performance to assess its effectiveness, visibility, and audience engagement. This stage is crucial for identifying underperforming content and areas for continuous improvement.

Liferay Tools for Displaying and Optimizing

Liferay provides versatile tools for displaying published content effectively across various channels. For example, you can render structured content using page fragments, both individually or as a collection. You can apply styling directly to fragments, or define FreeMarker templates that determine how content renders in site pages. Additionally, display page templates ensure a standardized display for content accessed at a dedicated URL. For external or non-browser applications, Liferay’s headless APIs enable flexible content consumption.

For optimizing content performance and engagement, Liferay offers a range of integrated tools. Liferay's personalization features are especially important for content optimization, enabling you to tailor content delivery to specific user segments. Beyond personalization, the Content Dashboard and Content Performance Tool provide insights into content performance (views, reads, traffic sources). Analytics Cloud offers comprehensive data analysis of user interactions, including behavioral segmentation and user journeys. A/B Testing enables data-driven improvements by comparing content variants. The Page Audit Tool assists with SEO by checking for issues like missing meta descriptions, invalid URLs, and link crawlability. Additionally, workflow metrics (e.g., SLAs, time resolutions) provide insights for optimizing internal processes.

Managing, Maintaining, and Deleting

The managing stage is an overarching administrative function, covering tasks like applying permissions and overseeing the content's journey. As such, it is a continuous process that addresses concerns across the other stages. Similarly, content maintenance is also a continuous process. This stage focuses on updating and refining content, often in response to optimization insights or changing business needs. Ensuring updates are consistent and propagated correctly across all instances is a key aspect of these stages.

Lastly, when content is no longer useful or required, it is either archived for record-keeping or permanently deleted. Implementing proper procedures is vital to avoid data loss or compliance issues.

Liferay Tools for Managing, Maintaining, and Deleting

In addition to basic management operations, Liferay’s applications support more advanced capabilities. This includes fine-grained permissions, taxonomies for organization, and administrative configurations. Since content maintenance involves continually updating and refining content, Liferay provides features to automate aspects of this process. One example is the content review date to prompt periodic reassessment. Finally, for content no longer required, you can easily expire or delete it.

Conclusion

The Liferay content lifecycle is a dynamic and interconnected process supported by a rich array of integrated features. By understanding each stage and strategically leveraging Liferay's comprehensive tools organizations can build robust and effective content management strategies that deliver high-quality, engaging digital experiences.

Next, you’ll explore principles for implementing effective publishing strategies.