The Questions Widget is a legacy application that was primarily maintained to support Liferay Ask. With the recent migration from Ask to Discuss (Liferay's new forum platform), this widget is no longer needed. Therefore, the Questions Widget is being deprecated to reduce technical debt and ongoing maintenance costs.

Search re-indexing has been optimized to deliver shorter re-index windows, especially for Objects-heavy deployments. In testing against production databases and architecture, we observed re-index improvements of 2x or more across the evaluated datasets, with gains reaching up to 10x on specific workloads. The optimizations primarily targeted improvements that scale with the volume and complexity of Object data being indexed.

Key Benefits:

• Shorter re-index windows reduce maintenance overhead and downtime risk

• Validated on a production-equivalent distributed architecture

• Largest impact for Objects-heavy installations

Building on the automated database repair routines introduced in 2025.Q4, Liferay DXP continues to expand the set of repair processes that run during the upgrade. Based on additional research into customer upgrade issues, new repair routines automatically identify and correct further sources of database inconsistencies, orphan references, and invalid data — before they cause upgrade failures or performance bottlenecks. These repair routines remain targeted at known issues with data structures only, keeping your critical data content safe. Details of each repair process continue to be provided for review in the Upgrade Report after the database upgrade completes.

Key Benefits:

• Minimize risks for current and future upgrades

• Automates data maintenance

When using the Liferay DXP Database Partitioning feature, the system now enforces strict access controls ensuring only the authorized database partition is accessible for any given request. This completes foundational security work and extends proper enforcement to all Liferay entry points, including Headless APIs and Client Extensions.

Key Benefits:

• Prevents unauthorized cross-partition data access in multi-tenant environments

• Ensures consistent partition access enforcement across all Liferay entry points (Headless, Client Extensions)

This is a major version release that brings important platform updates and security enhancements alongside several necessary breaking changes to ensure the continued delivery and stability of Liferay Developer Studio.

Key Benefits:

• Eclipse Platform Update: The underlying platform was updated to Eclipse 2025.12, taking advantage of the latest features and security updates from Eclipse. For more information, please see https://eclipse.dev/eclipse/news/4.38/.

• Blade Version Update: The packaged Blade version was updated to 8.0.1-SNAPSHOT.

From now on CK Editor 5 will be the default rich text editor present in Liferay DXP. For those customers with custom plugins or other particularities over CK Editor 4 that don’t want to upgrade yet, they can enable the deprecation Feature Flag (FF-11235) to have CK Editor 4 as default in DXP.

Note: CK Editor 4 still remains the default editor on some of the DXP features, those which are in Maintenance Mode such as Knowledge Base or Blogs, these experiences will not be migrated to CK Editor 5.

From now on CK Editor 5 will be the default rich text editor present in Liferay DXP.

Note: CK Editor 4 still remains the default editor on some of the DXP features, those which are in Maintenance Mode such as Knowledge Base or Blogs, these experiences will not be migrated to CK Editor 5.

This release rounds out the Pages Management APIs with new endpoints, broader page-type coverage, and refinements to how references and scopes are handled. The updates close long-standing gaps — supporting more page types end-to-end, expanding the catalog of page elements and fragments exposed through the API, and hardening the data architecture around scopes and secure references. The result is more reliable imports, exports, and staging across every site component.

Key Benefits:

• Broader API coverage: every page type is now supported end-to-end, not just the subset covered before.

• Fewer surprises in staging: scope-aware identifiers catch missing references and deleted assets before they break the live site.

• Consistent behavior across sites, staged environments, and imported content — the API no longer behaves differently depending on the page type.

We've refined how users discover and install Marketplace fragments from inside the Page Builder. Browsing, previewing, and installing partner and community fragments now feel native to the editing flow—fewer clicks, clearer discovery, and less context switching between the editor and the Marketplace. Native, already-installed, and Marketplace-available fragments now live side by side in the same experience.

Key Benefits:

• Faster discovery and installation of Marketplace fragments without breaking the editing flow.

• Clearer distinction between native, installed, and Marketplace-available fragments, so builders pick the right one at a glance.

• Less context-switching: everything happens inside the Page Builder instead of jumping to the Marketplace and back.

The Style Book Editor has been improved to make managing design tokens simpler and more intuitive, with a clearer approach to editing colours and improved overall usability.

Key Benefits:

• Faster updates: Edit colour tokens quickly through a single, clear interaction point.

• Easier to use: Fewer competing controls reduce confusion and make the editor more approachable.

• Consistent experience: Interaction patterns now align with the Page Editor, improving learnability.

• Built for growth: A stronger foundation to support future design token capabilities and enhancements.

• Fewer errors: Improved interactions reduce friction and mistakes when updating styles.

Style Book tokens are now aligned with Clay variables, ensuring that design changes apply consistently across UI components and themes.

Key Benefits:

• Reliable theming: Changes made in Style Books now correctly reflect across all Clay-based components.

• Real consistency: No more gaps where updating a token doesn’t affect parts of the UI (e.g. alerts, buttons).

• Better visibility: Token changes are accurately represented in the Style Book editor.

• Stronger foundation: Clay now exposes core variables (colours, typography, spacing) as CSS custom properties, making them easier to control.

• Future-ready: Sets the groundwork for more advanced theming and design system capabilities.

The Global Menu has been promoted from Beta to GA and is now the default, fully supported navigation experience in Liferay DXP. It provides a single, consistent entry point to access applications and settings, with improved structure, stable behaviour, and integrated search for faster navigation.

We are excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of the OpenSearch 2 Connector v2.0.0 for 2026.Q1 and v2.1.0 for 2026.Q2. This release is an important milestone in our Cloud Native Experience strategy, providing a viable alternative for Liferay DXP users.

This version has undergone additional testing and validation to ensure dependency alignment with the latest OpenSearch 2 clients and field mapping consistency with our Elasticsearch 8 connector.

The new version of the application is will be released on Liferay Marketplace.

Key Benefits:

• Native AWS Integration & Cost Optimization: Connect Liferay DXP with AWS OpenSearch Service. By leveraging managed infrastructure, organizations can reduce operational overhead, streamline their cloud stack, and optimize hosting costs through AWS-native service configurations.
• Flexible Search Architecture Production-ready alternative to Elasticsearch. This connector ensures that Liferay DXP remains flexible, allowing you to choose the search engine that best aligns with your infrastructure requirements and corporate standards.

Note: Liferay supports the connector and its features. While Liferay can provide an example deployment configurations for AWS OpenSearch Service, the management and maintenance of the underlying service remain the responsibility of the infrastructure provider.

Manage site updates with total confidence using the new Maintenance Mode. This feature allows Site Administrators to take a site offline for the public while maintaining full operational access behind the scenes. When enabled, visitors receive a dedicated maintenance page with the correct SEO-friendly status (HTTP 503), while administrators can continue to navigate, edit, and verify site pages to ensure everything is perfect before going live again.

Key Benefits:

• Safe Production Verification: Unlike standard deactivation, Maintenance Mode allows admins to view and test the full site experience live, ensuring that deployments are successful before the public ever sees them.

• SEO Protection: By serving a proper 503 Service Unavailable status, the system tells search engines that the downtime is temporary, protecting your search rankings during major updates or migrations.

• Users can select and reorder categories for a blog’s friendly URL, so they can preview the order of the categories in the friendly URL and determine how the categories will be presented in the friendly URL along with the title.

• Users are able to set different values for the asset types separators in the friendly URLs. Also, they are able to reset to default value, so for those asset types that they have clicked on this option, the separator will be the value defined by default for those specific asset types.

This release expands the support of the Timeline History feature to Blogs, Wiki pages, Bookmarks, Forms, Knowledge base, Message boards, and Categories. The feature enhances the publication toolbar with tools to detect and manage collaboration conflicts.

• A timeline icon shows recent modifications in the same asset, which may have been done in production or parallel Publications.

• The user can view, discard, or move these changes directly from the toolbar.

• Warning icons appear to make users aware of current conflicts in the Publication.

Key benefits:

• Enhanced context for content editors and managers for a streamlined collaboration.

• New capabilities to detect conflicts before publishing time, while users may have more time to decide how to resolve conflicts without the go-live pressure.

This set of improvements aims to simplify the manual work users must do to resolve conflicts when publishing a publication. Now, instead of raising a conflict to be resolved manually by the user, the system will try to overwrite conflicting changes in production with the modifications done in the publication, meaning that the Modification and Modification deletion conflict types won’t be presented for the user anymore.

In the case of a Deletion modification conflict, the system won’t resolve it automatically, but now it makes it easier to keep the modifications made in the publication. In the Conflicting changes screen, we added a button with the option to "Restore in Production" for conflicts in which the asset was deleted from production and is now in the Recycle bin.

Key benefits:

• Reduce the amount of manual work by automatically solving most of the conflicts.

• Improve user satisfaction and reliability on publications by ensuring that assets supported by Recycle Bin can be quickly restored, avoiding requiring the user to discard needed changes.

Provided an option to turn the “Out-of-date” feature on/off. When turned on (the default behavior before this release), ongoing publications created in previous Liferay versions were labeled as “Out-of-date” after the upgrade and could not be modified or published. This feature is now off by default, and users can publish these publications without Liferay support.

Key benefit:

Increase manageability over publications and the ability to publish any previous modification, including after Liferay upgrades.

The two separate option menus currently displayed in the Web Content Display widget have been merged into a single, consolidated dropdown menu for content creators. This new menu will improve the user experience by reducing confusion and unnecessary clicks, ensuring all relevant widget actions (e.g., Hide Widget, Duplicate, Export/Import, etc.) are easily accessible.

Added logging to indicate the completion of fragment deployments via the deploy folder. This provides better visibility into the deployment process and allows for tracking deployment duration.

There are some advantages of including a message like that, for example:

• Count the duration of a deployment
• See the fragment progress deployment until it is deployed.

Improved keyboard navigation and column resizing for Miller columns. Users can now navigate between columns both horizontally (deeper levels) and vertically (same level) using the keyboard. Column widths are also responsive, adapting to different screen sizes.

• Boost Liferay’s platform with drag-and-drop, multi-selection, and cut/copy/paste features for easier field and fragment organization.

• Fine adjustments in the User Experience when managing page components through in bulk multiselection

The updated Clay chart colour palette improves accessibility and usability by creating more contrast and adding more variations. Now users can easily distinguish charts, icons, and field sets, reducing confusion and improving clarity.
 

Key benefits:

• Now we have more design flexibility for Liferay’s current and future products.

• Accessible and distinguishable colours that will improve and unify the platform usability and UI.

The addition of new translations and locales ensures that users in regions like Macedonia, Norway, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria can interact with the platform in their preferred language or regional variation.

Key benefits:

• Tailors the user experience for specific markets and regions, improving relevance and usability.

• We made the platform more inclusive by expanding language and locale options.

This improvement allows users to customise the appearance of their Liferay instance more effectively with new properties in the .yaml file for Theme CSS and CSS Client Extensions.

Key benefits:

• Admins can personalise the interface for both the admin panel and the entire platform.

• A more cohesive, branded appearance will improve usability and satisfaction for all users.

• Allows fine-grained control over where customisations are applied.

Elasticsearch 8.17 has been tested and added to the compatibility matrix.

Liferay Self-Hosted deployments can update the Elastic stack to this version. For Liferay PaaS projects, as usual, a new Elasticsearch image will be provided under Liferay Cloud’s Docker Hub account.

As it was first highlighted in the Release Notes of 2024.Q3, per Elastic’s product lifecycle, Elasticsearch 7.17.x versions are supported and maintained until Elasticsearch version 9 is released.

While Elastic does not provide specific release dates for future releases, for Elasticsearch 9.0.0, the new release is anticipated in early calendar year 2025.

Compatibility with Elasticsearch 8 is available on Liferay DXP 7.4 U81+: Operating Liferay 7.4 GA/Update 81+ with Elasticsearch 8 - Liferay.

Note: The Elasticsearch 8.x compatibility is provided through the bundled Elasticsearch 7 connector and the REST API Compatibility of Elasticsearch 8.

Official release of Liferay Data Sets, moving from Beta to Release! Data Sets are a powerful and flexible way to retrieve, manage, visualize, and interact with structured data in Liferay DXP. Built on top of Objects and leveraging Liferay’s robust ecosystem, Data Sets exemplify the “build Liferay with Liferay” philosophy. With seamless integration with compatible Headless APIs, administrators can easily configure Data Sets and empower end-users with a rich, customizable experience for consuming and interacting with data.

Key benefits:

• Retrieve Data: Fetch information from any compatible Headless API to use as a Data Set source.

• Manage Flexibility: Administrators can customize what parts of the API response are included, along with filters, sorting options, and available actions.

• Visualize Data: Multiple visualization options make it easier than ever for end-users to consume data meaningfully.

• Enable Interaction: End-users can interact dynamically with data using the filters, actions, and tools configured by administrators.

To ensure the quality, stability, and modernity of Liferay DXP, we've updated to React 18, bringing significant benefits in security, performance, and compatibility. This update is critical to maintaining DXP's status as a robust and future-proof platform.

Key benefits:

• Security Enhancements: Older library versions can expose vulnerabilities. Upgrading to React 18 mitigates these risks by incorporating the latest security patches.

• Performance Improvements: React 18 introduces features like concurrent rendering, which enhances responsiveness and load handling for better user experiences.

• Enhanced Compatibility: Upgrading ensures DXP aligns with modern tools and frameworks, minimizing integration challenges and future-proofing our development processes.

• Continued Support: Staying current with React’s ecosystem ensures ongoing access to community updates, bug fixes, and innovations.

We’ve introduced robust Content Security Policy (CSP) capabilities to enhance the security of your digital experience platform. This feature supports eight key directives, including script-src and style-src among others, ensuring secure handling of scripts, styles, images, and more. By leveraging these directives, developers can mitigate cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and data injection risks. The CSP implementation aligns with modern web security standards, offering both flexibility and protection. Administrators can now enforce stricter security policies without compromising functionality.

Key benefits:

• Enhanced Security: Mitigates risks of XSS and data injection attacks by controlling resource loading and execution.

• Compliance-Friendly: Aligns with industry-standard security requirements, supporting stricter compliance protocols.

• Customizable Policies: Allows developers to tailor CSP directives to meet specific project or organizational needs.

• Improved Trust: Strengthens end-user trust by providing a more secure and reliable platform experience.

Official release of Liferay Data Sets, moving from Beta to Release! Data Sets are a powerful and flexible way to retrieve, manage, visualize, and interact with structured data in Liferay DXP. Built on top of Objects and leveraging Liferay’s robust ecosystem, Data Sets exemplify the “build Liferay with Liferay” philosophy. With seamless integration with compatible Headless APIs, administrators can easily configure Data Sets and empower end-users with a rich, customizable experience for consuming and interacting with data.

Key benefits:

• Retrieve Data: Fetch information from any compatible Headless API to use as a Data Set source.

• Manage Flexibility: Administrators can customize what parts of the API response are included, along with filters, sorting options, and available actions.

• Visualize Data: Multiple visualization options make it easier than ever for end-users to consume data meaningfully.

• Enable Interaction: End-users can interact dynamically with data using the filters, actions, and tools configured by administrator

Allow users to move web content and document structures between environments

Key benefit:
Addresses a feature gap when moving web content and documents between environments

Allow users to move workflow settings between environments
 

Key benefit:
Addresses a feature gap when moving applications built on Liferay between environments

Allow users to move Object Definitions and Entries between environments

Key benefit:
Addresses a feature gap when moving applications built on Liferay between environments

Previously, when managing complex data models, users must create scripts or code in order to make changes to multiple related objects. Now users are able to configure multiple objects as if they are one object. Related child objects now inherit permissions and account restrictions and more from the top level parent, making object management more convenient.

Key benefits:

Simplifies the management of multiple objects through a configuration on the relationship between objects

• Permissions and Account Restrictions for the child objects are inherited from the Top level parent

• API endpoints are nested under the same namespace of the top level parent

Allow users to move display pages containing Object or Form widgets across environments

Key benefit:
Addresses a feature gap when moving content pages across environments
 

Allow applications built on top of Service Builder to leverage the benefits of the Liferay Objects framework

Key benefit:
Applications built on top of Service Builder can now be migrated to Liferay Objects

The batch engine's export endpoints now support filtering for object entries. This addresses a previous limitation where filtering was not applied to object entries during batch exports. This update ensures consistent data handling and filtering behavior across all entity types.

Key benefits:

• Object entries Personalization
• Equalize capabilities for all entities

Until now, there was no way in batch engine to export and import object entries and their permissions simultaneously. This new capability allows users to do that, streamlining workflows and reducing manual effort.

Key benefits:

• Execution in only one call.

• Possibility for users to choose to take into account (or not) permissions with object entries.