Organizing Content for Navigation

Beyond traditional page hierarchies and static menus, Liferay provides powerful capabilities for dynamic and contextual content navigation. This approach is crucial for content-rich digital experiences, enabling you to guide users efficiently through vast amounts of information. By organizing your content, you boost discoverability and user flow, simplify maintenance, and ensure visitors easily find what they need.

Here, you'll learn how to leverage categories and tags to create flexible, dynamic navigation. We'll also explore using display pages to present content contextually, ensuring users find relevant information.

Navigating with Categories and Tags

Categories and vocabularies create powerful, flexible navigation for content-heavy sites like blogs, knowledge bases, and product catalogs. They help users quickly find relevant content by enabling filtering, sorting, and searching based on structured criteria. This improves usability and boosts engagement by connecting users to the right information faster.

In Liferay DXP, asset categories are user-defined tags applied to content. Vocabularies group these categories (e.g., topics, product types, or regions) to maintain structure and consistency across your site. Together, they enable scalable content governance and smarter navigation across complex sites.

When thoughtfully applied, categories and vocabularies do more than organize content, they power dynamic navigation and personalized experiences. By aligning taxonomy with user needs and business goals, you can guide users to relevant content.

Best Practices for Category Navigation

Effective category navigation does more than organize content, it shapes how users discover, access, and engage with your site. Consider these best practices as you design your site's taxonomy:

• Use hierarchical vocabularies for parent-child structures (e.g., Electronics > Smartphones).
• Enable multi-select when content fits multiple categories.
• Configure SEO-friendly URLs for category pages to improve search visibility.
• Assign permissions to categories when content access needs to be restricted.

By organizing your content this way, you improve discoverability, user experience, and long-term content governance.

Navigating with Display Pages

Display pages in Liferay DXP provide a structured, scalable way to present individual content items. Instead of building a custom page for every asset, display pages enables you to create reusable templates that dynamically render content like blog posts, product listings, or documents. This ensures consistent design, improves efficiency, and supports a clean content architecture.

Each display page template is tied to a specific content type (e.g., web content, blog entries, documents). When a user selects an item from a fragment or widget, Liferay automatically routes them to the corresponding display page. URLs typically reflect the content structure (e.g., /web/site-name/content-title).

Display pages improve site navigation by generating intuitive, predictable URLs and embedding dynamic content within the overall site hierarchy. This not only enhances discoverability and user experience but also boosts SEO through structured URLs and dedicated content views.

Best Practices for Display Page Navigation

Effective display page navigation keeps users engaged and oriented. It turns one-time content views into deeper journeys, helping users discover more and increasing the overall value of your site. To maximize this impact, consider these key recommendations for using display pages effectively.

Provide Clear Navigation Paths

Include elements like breadcrumbs and “Back to List” links to help users understand where they are and how to return to main content hubs. While the breadcrumb widget displays the full path (e.g., Home > Blog > Article), the manual “Back to List” button ensures intuitive navigation from individual pages back to content listings.

Encourage Sequential Exploration

Guide users from one content item to the next with previous/next navigation. You can build this using FreeMarker or custom fragments that query adjacent items based on publish date or ID. For more advanced cases, use a search container to list similar items.

Display Contextual Content

Display content that shares metadata with the current item using the Related Assets widget, Asset Publisher, or Collection Display. These components dynamically detect asset context and present relevant content, helping users go deeper into a topic without needing to search.

Enable Topic Filtering

Help users explore by theme using tag or category widgets, like the Tag Cloud or Category Navigation widgets. You can also create custom fragments that detect the current asset’s tags and show other content within the same category.

Ensure Mobile-Friendly Navigation

Design all navigation components to work across screen sizes. Use simple layouts, clear labels, and tap-friendly spacing so that users on any device can easily browse content without frustration.

Clarity’s Content Navigation Strategy

Clarity Vision Solutions manages an extensive digital presence, serving both B2B clients and B2C customers. A key goal for Clarity is to ensure users can effortlessly navigate their vast and diverse content, overcoming challenges like overwhelming menus and improving overall content discoverability.

To address this, Clarity plans to implement a dynamic navigation strategy leveraging Liferay's content organization features. They intend to use categories and tags to enable focused content filtering and browsing, creating flexible, and context-sensitive navigation. Additionally, Clarity aims to configure display page templates for all major content types (e.g., individual products, product articles). Once set up, Liferay automatically directs users to consistent, dedicated pages, which will ensure a uniform user experience, provide clean, shareable URLs, and enhance SEO for individual assets.

Conclusion

Liferay’s content organization tools go far beyond basic page structures, enabling dynamic, topic-driven navigation through categories, tags, and display pages. These features help users easily filter and discover content while ensuring consistent presentation and SEO-friendly URLs. Thoughtful content organization ensures users can seamlessly find what they need, driving both satisfaction and strategic business value.

Next, you’ll use categories to enhance Clarity’s product pages.