In the portal, Site Administrators are able to create different User Experiences for Pages. Publications can publish these Experiences. However it can be confusing for Publication Reviewers that they can not review changes introduced in all the Experiences, which are going to be published. Here we added the ability to Publication Reviewers to view changes added in all the Experiences which are going to be published.

We have received multiple requests about users having difficulties resolving conflicts during a Publication process. We listened for these requests, and decided to improve the quality of feedback provided to users about conflicts. Making the resolution of these conflicts easier.

Some applications do not support Publications. That situation can be really confusing when users try to use one of these applications, while inside a publication, and expect it to work together with Publications. We are aiming to make the user experience of the portal during publication as smooth as possible, so we decided to add a mechanism which provides the users with information if they start using one of these apps.

Improving performance is one of the main elements in our product strategy. Here we worked on improving the performance of the Review Changes screen. We have already improved the performance of other screens, and in the future we keep improving the performance of the screens.

Although Analytics Cloud provides valuable insights into the performance of content and pages, sharing this information within an organization has proven difficult for some users. To solve this problem, we are introducing a new feature that aims to enhance your sharing and reporting capabilities. With this feature, you can now effortlessly download PDFs of your dashboards and CSVs of lists (eg. segment membership), making it easier than ever to share critical insights with your stakeholders.

Key Benefits:

1. Time and Effort Savings: Exporting your dashboards to PDF and lists to CSV is a breeze. Say goodbye to the time-consuming task of manually extracting this information and formatting. Our platform streamlines the process for you.

2. Professional Reports: The PDF export feature ensures that your insights are presented in a polished and professional format, perfect for sharing with executives, clients, and colleagues.

To use this feature, simply click on the new Download button in the top right navigation bar. From there you can select the date range for the dashboards as well as the specific cards you wish to include in your report.

Although Analytics Cloud provides valuable insights into the performance of content and pages, sharing this information within an organization has proven difficult for some users. To solve this problem, we are introducing a new feature that aims to enhance your sharing and reporting capabilities. With this feature, you can now effortlessly download PDFs of your dashboards and CSVs of lists (eg. segment membership), making it easier than ever to share critical insights with your stakeholders.

Key Benefits:

1. Time and Effort Savings: Exporting your dashboards to PDF and lists to CSV is a breeze. Say goodbye to the time-consuming task of manually extracting this information and formatting. Our platform streamlines the process for you.

2. Professional Reports: The PDF export feature ensures that your insights are presented in a polished and professional format, perfect for sharing with executives, clients, and colleagues.

To use this feature, simply click on the new Download button in the top right navigation bar. From there you can select the date range for the dashboards as well as the specific cards you wish to include in your report.

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.

The upcoming Marketplace release of the Liferay Connector to OpenSearch 2.x will provide an alternative to Elasticsearch for Self-Hosted Liferay deployments.

IMPORTANT: Please note that the Liferay Enterprise Search Learning to Rank, Cross-Cluster Replication, and Monitoring applications are not compatible, and thus not supported with OpenSearch.

Introducing new key improvements to the B2B Guest Checkout experience, enhancing the overall user journey and providing greater flexibility for both new and returning customers.

Guests now have the option to sign in or sign up during the checkout process, directly from the mini-cart. Once logged in, users can either select an existing account or create a new one, ensuring that they can move through the purchase flow smoothly without disruptions. Upon setting the account, guests, now logged-in users, will be redirected to the checkout, making the transition to completing the purchase seamless.

Additionally, if a guest decides to sign in without necessarily checking out, the guest cart will now be merged with their account after logging in. This ensures that any items added to the cart during the guest session are retained when they sign in or select an existing account, improving the continuity and experience for returning users.

Key benefits:

1. Enhanced User Experience: By allowing guests to sign in or create an account directly from the mini-cart, we provide a more intuitive and streamlined checkout process. Guests can complete their purchase with minimal steps, reducing friction and abandonment rates.

2. Cart Persistence: The ability to merge guest carts ensures that items are not lost when guests decide to sign in or register. This improves convenience for returning users and supports a smoother transition between sessions.

Added External Reference Codes for references in widget configurations in Commerce and User Management applications. This helps promote data integrity when pages and their widgets are migrated across environments.

Key benefits:

References within the following page widgets now use External Reference Codes instead of internal IDs:

• Cart

• Cart Summary

• Category Content

• Commerce Addresses

• Commerce Category Navigation

• Mini Cart

• Open Carts

• Option Facet

• Order Forecasts Chart

• Organization Management

• Placed Orders

• Product Comparison Bar

• Product Comparison Table

• Product Details

• Product Downloads

• Product Publisher

• Search Results(Commerce)

• Specification Facet

The Centralized Products Eligibility and Configuration Management feature empowers catalog managers to efficiently manage individual products through multiple configuration pages containing all catalog’s products. With tools for manual configuration, eligibility-based visibility, and some bulk editing, this feature ensures streamlined operations and enhanced control over product offerings. Additionally, it enables faster and smarter management of product eligibility for channels, order types and accounts.

Key benefits:

1. Improved Catalog Management Efficiency:

• Simplified product configuration editing via a centralized, flat table view.

• Streamlined workflows for managing product attributes like visibility, minimum/maximum quantities, eligibility and much more.

• Avoid duplicating products to manage specific configurations by modifying targeted configurations instead.

• Perform batch updates on visibility, eligibility, and other product attributes for multiple products, whilst inheriting base setting from the Master catalog configuration

• Leverage pre-filled default master configurations to ensure consistency and simplify product setup when adding new products in a catalog.

2. Enhanced Control over Product Eligibility and Visibility:

• Define and manage eligibility rules tailored to specific customer groups, channels, and accounts

• Quickly adjust product availability and settings for various markets and segments (e.g. B2B vs B2C).

• Streamline the management of seasonal items or time-sensitive offerings using configuration scheduling.

Liferay Labs is an innovation hub within Liferay Marketplace dedicated to exploring newer technologies and developing experimental features. It provides a wide range of useful applications developed by Liferay staff. These are available to the community from Marketplace.

Liferay Labs serves as a platform for rapid prototyping and testing new ideas. These apps may often be integrated as future Liferay features. Under Liferay Labs, you can also find all the legacy apps that are no longer under official support.

All apps offered by Liferay Labs are free but without support. However, you may give feedback on apps containing beta features as it helps in improving them for a future release.

Key benefits:

1. Innovation Hub: serves as a testing ground for new and experimental technologies within the Liferay ecosystem.
Enables rapid prototyping and exploration of novel ideas.

2. Community Access: provides a platform for sharing valuable applications developed by Liferay staff with the broader Liferay community.
Makes these applications readily available through the Liferay Marketplace.

3. Future Feature Roadmap:Acts as a proving ground for potential future features of the Liferay platform. Allows for real-world testing and user feedback on new functionalities before official integration.

4. Legacy Application Repository: serves as an archive for legacy applications that are no longer officially supported. Enables users to access and utilize these applications if needed, while acknowledging their limited support.

External Reference Code is now supported in Currencies.

It is also now possible to use the ERC to update and delete Currencies via their headless APIs.

Additional ERC support for the entities that have a relation with a currency has been added when creating new Catalogs, Channels, Price Lists/Promotions, Orders and Payments.

Key benefits:

• Enhanced Data Management;

• Improved Integration Capabilities;

• Enhanced System Scalability;

• Reduced Errors

This feature allows warehouse managers to define granular eligibility rules for accounts and account groups to access specific warehouses. This enables fine-grained control over which customers can see and purchase inventory from which warehouses.

Key benefits:

1. Improved Inventory Management:

• Prevent unauthorized access to inventory data.

• Strategically control product visibility based on inventory quantities and stock levels.

• Optimize inventory allocation across customer segments.

2. Enhanced Customer Experience:

• Provide a more relevant and personalized shopping experience.

• Improve customer satisfaction by prioritizing access for key customer segments.

3. Increased Revenue:

• Generate higher revenue from valuable customer segments by prioritizing their access to inventory.

4. Reduced Lost Sales:

• Minimize lost sales due to stockouts by limiting product visibility for certain customer groups.

Enhance the user experience by allowing users to directly provision cloud applications from marketplace platform, simplifying application deployment.

Key benefits:

1. Streamlining Application Provisioning: Enable users to provision cloud applications directly from the Marketplace platform, eliminating the need for complex manual processes and without leaving the platform.

2. Intuitive User Interface: Provide an easy-to-use interface for installing and uninstalling cloud applications directly from the marketplace, including an intuitive form for inputting necessary information.

3. Efficient License Management: Offer a clear and intuitive interface for managing application licenses, ensuring compliance and optimizing resource utilization.

This release introduces a new Multishipping feature to the storefront, allowing customers to ship parts the same order to multiple addresses with a single checkout. Whether customers are sending gifts to different recipients or shipping products to various locations, the Multishipping feature offers a seamless and flexible shopping experience.

Administrators can allow multishipping in their site through a new configuration in the site’s Channel details page. The customers can access a new “Multishipping” tab in the Open Order Details page to easily manage the Delivery Groups and customize the quantity of each order item for every Delivery Group for the order before the checkout.

Please note that this feature is available through the existing “Commerce Classic Site Initializer” Beta feature flag. To enable it, open the Applications Menu → Control Panel → Instance Settings → Feature Flags → Beta.

Key benefits:

1. Easy to Setup: Multishipping can be activated for your site by enabling “Allow Multishipping” in your site’s Channel Details page.

2. Flexible Address and Delivery Management: Customers can easily set different shipping addresses or different delivery dates for the same address in the context of the same order.

This feature focuses on rigorously aligning the User Management headless APIs with the established standards and best practices. This includes:

• Comprehensive Functionality Testing: Verifying that all API endpoints (PATCH/POST/PUT) correctly update the expected fields in user records.

• Custom Field Support: Ensuring seamless integration and proper functioning of custom fields within the API interactions.

• Error Handling: Thoroughly testing error handling mechanisms and verifying that informative and user-friendly error messages are returned in all relevant scenarios.

• Data Manipulation Capabilities: Confirming the correct and efficient functioning of sorting, filtering, and other data manipulation operations within the API.

Key benefits:

• Enhanced User Experience: By ensuring the reliability and accuracy of the User Management headless APIs, we provide a seamless and efficient user experience for developers and integrators.

• Increased Developer Productivity: Well-defined and documented APIs empower developers to build integrations quickly and confidently, reducing development time and effort.

• Improved System Stability: Rigorous testing and alignment with standards minimize the risk of unexpected errors and system disruptions, leading to a more stable and reliable user management system.

• Enhanced Data Integrity: By ensuring accurate data updates and consistent API behavior, we maintain the integrity and consistency of user data across the system.

This feature enhances the filtering capabilities within the headless-admin-user endpoints by enabling filtering based on custom fields for Accounts and Account Groups.

Key benefits:

• Improved Data Retrieval Efficiency

• Enhanced Data Management

• Increased User Productivity

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Data imports, using batch engine, now allows users to preserve content creator information (if required). Previously, imported content with batch was always assigned the user performing the import, resulting in loss of original authorship data when moving content. This update ensures accurate attribution of content ownership (if required).

Key benefits:

• Able to keep critical user information during data promotion between environments

• Can be configured separately per import process

With our latest enhancements,  Content Admins will enjoy effortless content organization, regardless of folder structures, along with enhanced filtering capabilities for precision content management discovery. 

Features added in this Release:

Better experience to manage web content

In response to user feedback, several enhancements have been introduced for content creators. The first functionality addresses the challenge of easily finding and managing Web Content created within specific structures, allowing creators to review and edit content more efficiently. The other functionalities enable refined filtering and searching options, including the ability to search in the title, filter by categories and tag, filter search results and multi-select filters.

The Path Analysis tool has been enhanced with the addition of Exit Pages. This feature allows marketers to not only visualize users' entry points (referrer pages), but also their exit points (exit pages). With this user flow analysis, marketers can enhance user engagement and reduce bounce rates.

We have expanded the capabilities of AB Testing to allow the selection of a Collection Display Fragment as the Click Goal of an AB Test. This will allow customers to AB Test the clickthrough rate of different Collections or Collection Providers, empowering them to optimize which content is shown to end users.

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.

Our new Bulk Permission Management empowers administrators to modify access rights for multiple pages effortlessly. This new feature offers a multitude of benefits:

• Effortless Management: Save valuable time by managing permissions for multiple pages simultaneously.
• Enhanced Security: Gain complete visibility into page access, ensuring all intended audiences can access the content they need.
• Optimized Accessibility: Quickly identify pages not accessible to Guests and make adjustments for optimal user experience.

The Category Facet uses assetVocabularyCategoryIds field for aggregation. The required mapping and indexer changes have been available since 7.4 GA46/U46 (LPS-156503: Display, Scope and Filter Categories by Vocabulary in the Category Facet).

Note: Reindex is required after all upgrades.

A new set of tooling is being provided, to centralize all the different tooling into a single solution, therefore, stand-alone tooling like the Fragments Toolkit does not make sense anymore as a stand-alone tool. In addition to that, the fragment toolkit needed upgrades to prevent some vulnerabilities that could happen. Therefore, we recommend adopting other solutions for now. The Fragment Toolkit will remain available for a minimum of one year. 

Now, users are able to visually understand the structure of their objects and how they connect with each other to result in the platform model.

Allow clients to request a quote for individual products instead of setting a price. Includes the option to use a Price List or a Promotion to price the Product as "Price on Application". There is also the ability to activate the "Request a quote" option on a fully priced cart for a particular channel.

Sell and manage SKUs by adding different Units of Measure to the SKU. Configure the Unit of Measure to optionally allow for sales in decimal quantities. Units of Measure have their own pricing and inventory. Once configured, they add to the shopping experience of the buyer who can now purchase SKUs in different Units of measure.

Used in Conjunction with Supplier Accounts, this object's rule, once configured, splits Commerce Orders automatically by the Catalog that each Product belongs to. The Channel on the Order is updated to be the channel linked to the same supplier that the catalog is linked to. The order splitting rule effectively allows the supplier to manage orders for their own specific products.

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

This enhancement introduces configurable default permissions for newly created pages. Admins can set these permissions at both the instance and site levels. Instance-level settings are managed in a new Instance Settings panel, while site-specific overrides can be configured in the Site Configuration area.

• This functionality refers to segments that are static groups of users.

• That said, users can now utilize either user group-based segments or dynamic segments instead of static ones moving forward.