Now, admins can customize the configuration of the Rich Text Editors with this new client extension, allowing them to set the toolbars that are available on different applications. In the form, you will have to define the instances in which the configuration will be taken into account as well as the JS that contains the configuration:

 Override default settings and tailor colors, fonts, and other design elements directly through the ThemeCSS Client Extension. This update ensures a visually consistent and brand-aligned experience for your website visitors.  Simplify website customization and elevate your brand presence!

You can leverage AI to create draft product descriptions and images with a single click, improving your content creation efficiency and sparking creative inspiration. Experience the future of content creation – try AI-powered product descriptions today!

 Our latest update introduces a new version of the TradeCentric Connector (formerly PunchOut2Go) for Liferay DXP 7.4, simplifying B2B integrations with your trading partners. Additionally, the Stripe Payment Method Client Extension, available on the Liferay Marketplace, allows you to offer your customers a wider range of payment options, fostering a smoother checkout experience.  Boost efficiency, improve customer satisfaction, and unlock new business opportunities with this powerful update!

Utility pages are content pages managed at the site level. Since the default system-level pages are not customizable, you can use site-level utility pages to provide a unique experience. Several utility pages are available out-of-the-box. You can customize them or add your own.

Our latest update empowers you to design custom Sign In, Forgot Password, and Create Account pages. 

Now, if an asset type (for example, an Object definition) has several related Display Page Templates, and one of them is marked as Default, we allow to map links to any of the existing Display Page Templates for that Asset Type, in addition to the Default one.

This new possibility allows some interesting use cases for customers, such as:

• Differentiated View Display Page and Edit Display Page for Object entries.
• Multi-step processes (that need different step URLs) can be now created by using one Display Page per step.

Sometimes the changes added to a publication needs to be reviewed by someone who is not a member of the site. The goal here was to make unauthenticated users able to review changes within a publication. For this we implemented a mechanism to generate a code, which can be used to access the Review Changes screen of a certain publication. Also this link could be easily invalidated/generated anytime by authenticated Publication Reviewers.

The goal here is to make the users able to move changes between publications. This is needed because sometimes users do not want to publish an entire publication, but also do not want to revert the changes which will not be published actually. With this feature users can move changes from one publication to another, creating subsets of changes, and publish them separately. For readers with technical knowledge: this is similar to cherry-pick-ing a commit in git from one branch to another.

A common problem we have heard from our customers revolves around the time required to complete an AB Test. If a customer’s page receives limited traffic, the time to completion could be many weeks if not months.  Amidst the rapid changes in today's business landscape, this delay potentially negates the usefulness of test results. On top of this, if a user were to terminate the test prematurely, the insights they gathered from the test and the variant they created were lost.

In order to remedy this issue, we are now providing test results and the ability to publish a variant when an AB Test is terminated. Although these results cannot determine a winning variant with 100% confidence, they will give marketers a sense of how their variant was performing. Using this information, Marketers can now make educated decisions according to their specific time constraints.

It is important to remark that this feature is DXP-only, as it belongs to Analytics Cloud.

The ability for a buyer or sales agent to edit a product bundle directly from the mini-cart has now been added. Previously, if a change had to be made the bundle had to be deleted from the cart and added again. This allows for more speedy alterations to be made before proceeding with check out.

Capabilities:

1. Azure DevOps Authentication: Supports integration of Azure Git repositories via Azure DevOps with Jenkins, including PAT generation for authentication.
2. Jenkins Build Integration: Configure Jenkins to poll or check the Azure repository based on specific triggers.
3. LCP.json Setup for CI Service: Define Azure DevOps as the SCM provider and specify details for Jenkins interaction.
4. Deployment Configuration: Allows push from GitHub to Azure DevOps and deployment from Jenkins to the designated infra environment.

Benefits:

1. Versatility: Users can leverage Azure DevOps as their Git repository provider while working within Liferay Cloud.
2. Automated Updates: Automatic polling of the Azure repository every 5 minutes, ensuring timely builds upon detected changes.
3. Security: Utilizes Personal Access Tokens for specific and secure authentication, combined with best practices for token management.

Reducing downtime, improving operational and resource utilization efficiency with the new Concurrent and Sync reindex execution modes providing high-availability in search capabilities while the operation is running.

Admins now can define views and select fields that are localized, so users will access the corresponding translation when visiting the page. Additionally, the names of the columns and filters are also localizable.

In order to use this feature it is needed to enable “Translation Support for Object Entries” in the Feature Flags menu before enabling “Data Set Manager” in the beta section of the Feature Flags menu.

With the Data Migration Center, users can export and import, in a very easy way, Objects entries and Objects definitions from one instance to another using JSON files. The actions executed can be consulted later in a list when you can download the files generated every time is needed.

The Analytics mobile app allows users to access the main reports and dashboards on-the-go to stay on top of the most relevant metrics for the business.

We have enhanced our recommendation engine to provide two new recommendation algorithms: one focused on recommending content based on the user's browsing history on the website, and the other one providing recommendations based on most popular content. These recommendation strategies can be used by adding the matching content collections to any page. Experimentation and attribution is also possible by comparing them through an AB test that determines the best strategy to increase CRO. 

Liferay Portal 7.4 CE GA101+ and Liferay DXP 7.4 Update 101+ and Liferay DXP 2024.Q1 are bundled with Elasticsearch 7.17.14 as the Sidecar server.

In addition, the Elasticsearch client libraries have also been upgraded to 7.17.14. Refer to the Breaking Changes notes below for more details how this may impact deployments.

LXC now provides anomaly detection to identify disruptions in the expected website traffic. 

Anomalies in traffic volume are detected through a comparison with historical data, taking into account seasonality. Users can also create alerts based on custom events and schedule notifications when thresholds in metrics are exceeded.

Now, users are able to fill out object entries in parts, allowing them to save data as draft and return at their convenience to complete.

This feature addresses the inconvenience of not being able to remove specific entries from user invitation forms, enhancing the user experience for admin users who create these forms. It solves the problem of inefficient form management, allowing users to remove entries without starting over.

The feature enables users to remove entries from the invitation form by clicking a designated removal button, with a confirmation modal to prevent accidental removal.

Compatibility with IBM WebSphere application server has been deprecated as of Q4.2023. Please migrate to another application server on the Compatibility Matrix. WebSphere compatibility is expected to be removed at the end of 2024.

Compatibility with Java JDK 8 runtime has been deprecated as of Q4.2023. Java JDK 11 is now the recommended runtime environment. All Java Technical Compatibility Kit (TCK) compliant builds of Java 11 are certified. DXP source compile and runtime compatibility for a higher Java JDK is expected in 2024.

This feature adds read-only support for all object fields types, making sure users are not able to update those fields from both the UI or APIs, only the system can: through default values or actions, for example.

This feature allows users to delete fields from published objects that were added before the object got published, giving more flexibility to admin users.

Make it easier for suppliers to manage products and orders with an OTB account type supplier, and a Generic Supplier role, that grants them the ability to manage their own product catalog(s) and channel. With this, they will have the ability to create product bundles with SKUs from Supplier Catalogs.

New Account Type of Supplier. A Supplier can be linked to a catalog and to a channel to allow the supplier to manage their own products, price lists, promotions, catalogs, discounts, inventory and channel in order to be able to fulfill orders for their own products.

We have enabled the integration with ChatGPT so texts can be generated from the Web Content editor.
There is a new button on the CKEditor (web content editor) that triggers a modal where users can write a prompt (instructions for the bot) and add additional parameters such as tone and length.

A new application, named Data Set Manager (Data Sets in the Control Panel) allows admins to define through a UI data set views for the different headless resources available. Admins will be able to choose the data source, as well as configure the columns to be available and the pagination options for the different views.

To enable this feature:

1. Add feature.flag.LPS-167253=true to your portal-ext.properties
2. Go to Instance settings > Feature Flags and enable “Data set manager” in the Beta tab.

In addition to the data set manager, two additional components have been added to provide the full value to the users:

• A new fragment, so these views can be integrated in any content page. Content managers will select the data set view to display on each fragment.
• A new frontend client extension, Frontend Data Set Cell Renderer, that allows developers to customize how any field of the data set view is rendered, providing total control of the look and feel of any column.

Improves the overall usability of the application and also the ability to reorder and add items. Also improve the accessibility of functionality:

• Now it is possible to move the items in a navigation menu using the keyboard.
• There is more flexibility when adding items to the navigation menu since you can now select the place where you want to add them to.

Now, when creating pages and display pages to visualize object entries, users can easily display related object entries. To enable this, we have added:

• In a one-to-many or many-to-many object relationships scenario, new related item collection providers access information of the “many” side of a one-to-many and many-to-many relationships. For example: a Countries object, and a related “cities” object for cities in those countries. This new capability allows users to easily list the cities that belong to a country, and other data from each city, via a related item collection provider.
• In a one-to-many object relationship, if we are listing or displaying the items of the “many” side, information of the “one” side is available for direct mapping as well. For example: a “Countries” object, and a related object for cities in those countries. When listing the cities, this new capability allows to easily display the country which each city belongs to.
• Attachment field attributes (such as download URL and file size) are now available for direct mapping.

Improved navigation through the different tabs and pages in Knowledge Base in the manage toolbar, sidebar search, sidebar primary button, priority and general interactions.

Table View is displayed in the Knowledge Base.

Publications can take up quite a bit of space in the database.  While some users need an extensive history, others do not.

With this new feature we can provide an optional clean up to remove older publications for those who do not need the history.

Users can preview the changes of a wiki page within a publication.

We have refactored Ongoing, Scheduled and History tabs to use dataset display, and added a configuration to speed up review changes screen.

Operating Liferay (on-prem!) with Elasticsearch 8 as a search engine leveraging its REST API compatibility mode through the bundled Elasticsearch 7 connector allowing Liferay deployments to upgrade the Elastic Stack to 8.x (opt-in), while also keeping compatibility with 7.x.

General Upgrade Instructions:

Please refer to the documentation for more details.

1. No action is required for deployments already using and insisting to stay on Elasticsearch 7.
2. Moving to Elasticsearch 8 may require a full reindex depending on the choice of the upgrade path:
   1. Upgrading the current Elasticsearch 7.x cluster to 8.x and connect DXP (Upgrade Elasticsearch | Elasticsearch Guide [8.10] | Elastic , recommended) → No reindex required
   2. Setting-up a new Elasticsearch 8.x cluster, connect DXP → Reindex required!

This is not a new connector, but enhancements to the existing bundled Elasticsearch 7 connector and other Elasticsearch-only features (like Commerce, Workflow Metrics or Search Tuning) leveraging the REST API compatibility mode of Elasticsearch 8 servers.

Liferay Portal 7.4 CE GA78 and Liferay DXP 7.4 Update 78 Tomcat Bundles and Docker Images come with Elasticsearch 7.17.10 for Sidecar.

This new frontend client extension allows users to replace the existing theme spritemap without the need to redeploy a theme. The spritemap should include all icons needed for the scope where it is used.

The Control Panel still uses the admin spritemap.

After registering the client extension, in the page template or page you need to use it, configure it from the design options menu:

To enable this client extension, do it from the Feature Flags management UI:

This feature allows developers to create or update an object and its related elements in a single request, optimizing the requests performed to the server, thus improving the overall performance of your solution.

Provided the necessary data for the related elements (ExternalReferenceCode, Id, etc), if the element already exists, it will relate the two objects, if the related element does not exist, it will create the object and it will relate them.

It is also possible to remove related elements by just updating the parent without the elements that are not related anymore.