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.

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.

With this improvement, the Data Migration Center allows users to export and import Object Entries using CSV files. Not all field types are supported but many of the most used ones are:

Supported field types: dateandtime, date, decimal, integer, longint, longtext, precissiondecimal, richtext, text and picklist.

In order to help users, only supported fields are available for exporting at the UI. As new types are allowed, they will appear available in the UI.

We are excited to introduce enhancements to streamline your cloud management experience! With our updated cloud console view, you will have a detailed breakdown of subscription metrics per environment, empowering you to manage resources more effectively. Additionally, our new storage consumption tracker offers real-time insights into project storage usage, ensuring you're always informed about quota limits.

Under all supported formats, users can select the origin and destination site of the data so it is possible to export and import object entries between any site.

We refactored the way Liferay scripts were managed, so admins can define stricter policies like:

script-src '[$NONCE$]'; script-src-attr 'unsafe-inline';

Limitations: If a policy like the one above is configured, the parts of the product that uses a rich-text editor will not work correctly. Analyze your scenario to identify how strict your policy can be in order to make the solution work.

With this development, the publication of Knowledge Base articles will be schedulable, in particular, the feature is so designed:

• The primary Publish button will have an arrow down with the “Publish” option, that will immediately publish the article, and the “Schedule” one.

• Clicking the Schedule option, will make a modal appear so the user can set a date and time for the article to be published.

• The Scheduled article will have the SCHEDULED status that will change to APPROVED on the scheduled date

• A tooltip with the scheduled date information will appear when hovering the question-circle-full icon placed next to the SCHEDULED state.

• Editing a scheduled article will provide the user the ability, by clicking the primary button that has turned into “Scheduled”, to:

  • Cancel the operation

  • Publish Now

  • Schedule: this option will save the article, date & time changes and the user will return to the previous screen before entering edit mode

• Additional feature: A Knowledge Base article deletion action will move it to the Recycle Bin so that it can be restored.

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:

This feature allows you to leverage the functions of Liferay’s caching framework. Our current measurements indicate about 10%/30% performance increase in database writing operations, also 10 times faster reading performance!

Now users can configure the values for the following properties from settings (system, instance or site settings):

• session.timeout.auto.extend
• session.timeout.auto.extend.offset

When the Upgrade Report is enabled, the output directory of the report can be configured with the new portal property upgrade.report.dir

If this property is not set, the upgrade report can be found in the default directory:

• portal-tools-db-upgrade-client/reports for the upgrade tool.
• {liferay-home}/reports if upgrade was executed on startup.

With this feature we extending the SCIM implementation with User Group un/provisioning as well with the User Group membership un/provisioning.

Previously customers would add captchas using a TagLib. But this is no longer useful since customers are not deploying JSPs. The Captcha API enables this functionality to be used in arbitrary contexts.

The user experience of the Management Toolbar present in multiple applications (Web Content, Blogs, Documents & Media) has been improved:

• Separate sections for filter and order.
• Changed “+” with “New” for clarity.
• Moved info icon to the right.

Now user are able to:

• Configuration of document size for copying in D&M

• Bulk copying of documents and folders

• Currently the copy action for documents and folders is able to be performed in Portal without fully respecting the site-asset library relationship. The expected behavior is:

  • An asset library must be connected to a site in order to copy a document over to the site

  • A document cannot be copied from a site to an asset library (only the other way around)

  We can enforce a stricter check when performing the copy action between asset libraries and sites. Instead of the end user receiving a success message when copying a document to a disconnected site, an error message should appear telling the user to set the connection first.

• Document Types contained in a document are being copied in Documents and Media so that they can be easily reused.

• Categories and Tags in Documents and Media are being automatically copied so they can be easily reused on a new site.

Users are now able to properly search in the portal using the Search widget (in applications that have data restricted by account).

To reduce the maintenance costs of providing a full document’s preview, the following changes are being introduced:

• “No preview available” state when the file size exceeds the preview size limit.

• Merge “File Entries” and “PDF Preview” settings under “File Preview Limits”

• Rename "File Size Limits" to "File Upload Limits" with a reviewed and more understandable Description copy

• The user is being informed that the generated preview may not correspond to the entire document

This development introduces the ability for the user to set the file size at asset library’s level. This settings will override the already existing one at System level when the latter is bigger. As a general rule, when both are set the lowest applies.

When adding validations in Objects, many times it is necessary to validate dates against the current date.

Key Features:

1. Dynamic Date Comparison - Users can compare a selected date with the current system date. This empowers you to create rules that trigger based on the relationship between a date field and the present date.

2. Versatile Date Range Checks - Validate whether a date falls within a specified date range relative to the present date.

Users can add read-only fields to object definitions that automatically increment for each new entry.

Key Features:

1. Customize Starting values - Users can set a starting value. This flexibility allows for better alignment with specific business needs and workflows

2. Customize labels - Users can set prefixes and suffixes to provide alphanumeric keys appended to the incrementing values

Users can add validations to verify field values that, when used in combination, are unique.

Limitation: numeric fields such as Integer, Long Integer, Decimal, Precision Decimal will be stored as null.

Validate relationships to prevent duplicate names in child objects.

We continue to improve the API Builder by adding new endpoints: GET single element. With the GET single element new endpoint, we allow users to create a GET endpoint that only retrieves a single element using a path parameter.

One particular thing is that users can select as a path parameter any unique custom field defined in the object apart from ID and External Reference Code.

New POST endpoint inside API Builder to add the possibility not only of recovering information of the entries but also of creating them.

As in the GET methods, users can define the schema to use for the request and the response. Both can be the same or two different ones. And can even be one already used previously on another endpoint definition.

Company and Site scope is available too.

The POST method only works for creating new entries of the main object . No entries for the related objects can be created yet at the same time.

SCIM provides a unified, RFC compliant way to keep user/group data in sync between different applications. Liferay is a service provider and enables clients to be connected. Through the defined RESTful APIs and schemas, clients can perform CRUD operations to keep resources in sync.

Pages served by Liferay might make use of third party cookies. In order to inform Liferay to manage them as part of the user cookie consent, now Portal developers and Content creators have a way to indicate the portal about them.

In order to make Liferay aware of them, the content creator or portal developer will need to update the markup to the following:

First, indicate the type of cookie following this format:

Second, change the markup depending on the element affected:

For example, embedding a video from a video provider, will see the markup changed in the following way:

• Before: <iframe src="..." />
• After: <iframe data-src="..." `data-third-party-cookie="CONSENT_TYPE_FUNCTIONAL"  />

We have introduced a configuration feature within the Asset Library, enabling users to decide whether a Vocabulary created there is solely required at the Asset Library level or if it extends to the connected Sites as well.

Use the platform's configurable purchasing rules to dictate which product options need to be purchased together when setting up products with options. You can set which product options must be purchased together and/or which product options cannot be combined together to create a valid product bundle. You can also limit the number of products from a particular group of products that can be purchased together.

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 more speedy alterations to be made before proceeding with check out.

Two new permissions were added to View and Edit the channel default tab in the Account Management Pages. Users are now able to activate/inactivate the tab.

The allowable size of an Account Name has been increased to 250 characters in line with industry standards.

We have introduced case-sensitive tagging for page creators, allowing tags to be saved and displayed exactly as created, whether in uppercase or lowercase. The feature ensures case sensitivity for tag creation, case-insensitive searching, and autocomplete, while maintaining backward compatibility for existing tags.

Users now have the ability to restrict channel access to certain Accounts via the eligibility tab on the channel admin pages. The ability to restrict certain Account Addresses to be used on certain channels has also been added. This is managed via an Eligibility tab on the address that allows the user set channel usage.

Enables the ability to add new remote shipping calculations via client extension.

Ability to add new steps to the checkout process via client extension.

You can use Liferay’s revamped organization management chart to view, manage, and search through organizations, associated accounts, and users. Users with permissions can now view or edit more details of it on the chart.

In order to improve user experience and avoid difficulties with sharing and reporting insights from AC to other members of the organization, we are introducing the Download Reports feature. This functionality allows users to easily download their dashboards as PDFs and specific lists (e.g.: segment membership) as CSVs, streamlining the process of socializing this information with stakeholders.

This new feature provides the ability for the Order Manager to make refunds against on-line payments using the stand alone payment gateway. While the refund amount can be configurable, the refund is always made against the payment method of the original payment.

This feature decouples the payment gateway from the order engine in order to allow you to capture payments against objects and to support new payment methods via client extension.

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

Highlights:

References within the following page widgets now use ERC’s instead of internal ID’s:

• Announcements
• Web Content Display
• Category Filters
• Questions

We added External Reference Codes for Categories and Tags and their associated API’s, improving their portability for data migration scenarios.

Highlights: 

• Users can now perform CRUD operations using a Tag’s ERC through its headless API (Keyword)

• Users can now perform CRUD operations using a Category’s ERC through its headless API (TaxonomyCategory)

We added several API endpoints for Documents & Media to improve programmatic management of these entities.

Highlights:

• Users can now add, delete, and retrieve document types via headless API (DocumentDataDefinitionType)

• Users can now add, delete, and retrieve document metadata sets via headless API (DocumentMetadataSet)

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.