The latest version of Liferay is available since July and with a multitude of new features and improvements over the previous version.
In this new version the OSGI is still well-known and the “old” plugins were replaced by modules. The Liferay team greatly invested on improving the usability of the portal, such as Web Experience, User Administration, Blogs and Forums, Workflows and System Settings.
Web Experience
Users will now have an improved Web Expericence and here’s some of the reasons why:
- Page Fragments that allow the development of HTML, javascript and CSS blocks are available to everyone (even to those who can’t imagine themselves programming). The construction of pages is possible due to the composition of several fragments previously developed.
- Content Pages, a new way to create and manipulate pages directly and with just a few clicks.
- Multiple Navigation Menus, which allow the user to create several navigation menus in the header, side menu or even in the footer.
Forms
Another major enhancement is the easy way we can create forms through the improved Liferay Forms already introduced in the previous version, for example, a new function that provides fields to upload files.
System Settings And User Administration
System Settings such as User Administration have been completely improved. The settings were regrouped, as some of the configurations until now were only available in Server Administration. In User Administration, the possibility of submiting form by form was included, allowing a better User Experience by avoiding the lost of data when the user data is changed. Only for these few small changes it’s already worth to invest our time in testing this new Liferay version!
Infrastructure
At the infrastructure level, the inclusion of Tomcat 9 server and ElasticSearch 6.0 support is a great advancement. But don’t just take my word for it and download it now and try these new features.
The improvements go on an on. For the next article I’ll be addressing each of these points in detail, so stay tuned!