Enhanced User Safety and Transparency in Publications

We have implemented safeguards to guide users through complex interactions and provided clearer information about changes in the Review Changes screen. 

Smoother Workflow for Publication Editors

The new toolbar offers real-time insights to help editors stay focused and efficient. We have improved the toolbar to provide essential context, including current publications, potential conflicts, and change history.

Enabling users to be notified externally by allowing email notifications when a new user is assigned to a publication.

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

Create smooth multistep forms directly in the page builder with Liferay’s new fragment—making complex processes simple and intuitive!

Liferay DXP makes it easy to create dynamic, multi-step forms. Simply add a stepper fragment to any existing form to transform it into a multi-step journey. You can then organize your form into different steps, moving inputs between them as needed. Users can easily navigate through the steps using the step menu or form buttons, which you can customize to fit your needs.

Enable JavaScript Client Extensions within SaaS environments to enhance customization and flexibility for administrative tasks, allowing tailored solutions directly within the platform.

This feature ensures that theme CSS client extensions "just work" out of the box when referencing images from the base theme. It reduces friction in the development process, increases reliability, and provides a more seamless and predictable experience when customizing their Liferay environments.
 

How it works:

Simplified Image Management:

• Developers no longer need to manually handle or configure paths for images included in the base theme.

• Relative paths (e.g., ../images) can now directly reference these images, reducing complexity and errors.

Out-of-the-Box Compatibility:

• The feature ensures that theme images are automatically included during the build process via the assemble step.

• This means that after deploying the theme CSS client extension, image references work seamlessly without additional configuration.

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.

Synonym Sets now also supports the following languages (locales) out of the box:

• Portuguese (Brazil): pt_BR

• Portuguese (Portugal): pt_PT

• Italian: it_IT

• Arabic (Saudi Arabia): ar_SA

• Catalan (Spain): ca_ES

• Catalan (Andorra): ca_AD

• Catalan (Spain, Valencian): ca_ES_VALENCIA

• Chinese (China): zh_CN

• Chinese (Taiwan): zh_TW

• Dutch (Netherlands): nl_NL

• Dutch (Belgium): nl_BE

• Finnish (Finland): fi_FI

• French (France): fr_FR

• French (Canadian): fr_CA

• German (Germany): de_DE

• Hungarian (Hungary): hu_HU

• Japanese (Japan): ja_JP

• Swedish (Sweden): sv_SE

Administrators are advised to review the Elasticsearch connector configuration and remove any customized field mappings and settings added previously for the above locales from the Override Type Mappings and the Additional Index Settings as now they are provided by the platform out-of-the-box. (Requires a Full or Concurrent Reindex!)

The new Date Range and Range aggregation types unlock powerful search capabilities for your Liferay assets, including Web Content Structures and Objects.

By configuring any date or numeric index field, you can:

• Group and Filter Results: Create dynamic search filters based on specific dates or numeric ranges.
• Customize User Experience: Offer flexible search options with predefined ranges or custom input fields.
• Visualize Data Effectively: Leverage out-of-the-box display templates for a seamless user interface.

Think of Date Range as a versatile extension of the Modified Facet. You can now select any desired date field to refine search results precisely.

Note:
The functionality of the Date Facet widget was introduced under a Developer Feature Flag in LPS-153839 2024.Q1 has been integrated into the Custom Facet and is now available as GA. The Date Facet widget is no longer available.

Improved Disk Space Utilization for Elasticsearch and OpenSearch Deployments

To reduce disk space usage on the search engine side, we have optimized default field mappings which no longer use stored fields. Instead, the platform uses the fields parameter as the default document field retrieval method.

Important Considerations for Administrators:

• Review Advanced Settings: Administrators should carefully examine the "Additional Type Mappings" and "Override Type Mappings" settings within the search engine connector configuration.

• Compare with Defaults: After reviewing the advanced settings, compare the existing mappings to the new defaults to identify potential adjustments. While stored fields are still supported, they are not recommended.

Potential Impact on Custom OSGi Modules:

While most users should experience seamless transitions, developers of custom OSGi modules that utilize Liferay's Java Search APIs may encounter changes in search response behavior. This could occur if the modules rely on specific fields being included in the search response. In such cases, developers may need to make adjustments to their modules to ensure correct functionality.

OpenAI can now be configured as a Text Embedding Provider for Semantic Search.

OpenAI offers two powerful third-generation embedding models promising lower costs, higher multilingual performance, and stronger overall performance compared to the predecessor models.

If your organization is already utilizing OpenAI's ChatGPT or other OpenAI Platform APIs, now you can take advantage of OpenAI's Vector Embeddings capability to deliver semantically more relevant search results through Liferay's semantic search feature (BETA) without the need to sign up for another service.

The Data Set Manager sorting tab has changed its purpose. From now on, the sorting options created under this section will be added to an Order Drop Down that is added to the Management Bar. This way, users will be able to sort by different criteria, even if those criteria are not visible in the Data Set items.

Admins can now leverage Data Set actions to send targeted requests to a specified endpoint. This enables dynamic updates to persisted objects, such as changing a user's status to "Inactive." While the request body content is currently static, this powerful feature provides a flexible way to manage and modify data within your system.

Data Sets now offer even greater customization power. Admins can directly add manual query parameters to the endpoint URL, enabling fine-grained control over data retrieval.

This flexibility allows you to:

• Filter Data: Apply specific filters to narrow down the results
• Select Fields: Choose the exact fields you want to retrieve
• Flatten Responses: Simplify complex data structures
• Search for Specific Terms: Find relevant information quickly

By tailoring the endpoint response, admins can provide a more curated and user-friendly experience for end-users.

Behind the Scenes:

The platform seamlessly reconciles these manual parameters with those generated by:

• Admin Configuration: Fields and Actions tab settings
• End-User Interactions: Filter and sort options selected in the UI

This ensures a consistent and efficient data retrieval process.

On top of that, admin users can also add or map fields manually to be displayed in the Data Set, so they will be able to bring the information back for those endpoints that don’t have the fields properly typed in the response.

The Database Upgrade Report is now enabled by default and offers expanded information compared to previous releases.

After running a database upgrade, check the reports/ directory for reports about what occurred in the system during the upgrade. The new upgrade_report_diagnostics file includes further details to diagnose any possible issues.

New properties and configurations have been added to allow control over the default user created for new virtual instances.

The instance admin user can be defined by the system admin upon instance creation or be disabled completely. This adds an immediate additional layer of security to a new virtual instance.

This update enhances the transparency and accountability of your Process Builder definitions. By tracking modification dates and user information, you can easily identify changes, troubleshoot issues, and ensure compliance. With this improved version history, you can effectively manage your processes and make informed decisions.

Currently, in Liferay Forms, users can customize field labels for ease of reference in the page’s HTML.

Now, users are able to fully customize and reference in the HTML the remainder of the Form.

We added the permissions assigned to Custom and Modifiable Object Entries to the Objects Entries APIs' nested fields. This will be useful when we export/import Object Entries with permissions through Batch.

When the access token is near the expiration date, the portal sends notifications to the System Administrator about it.

Liferay Cloud currently supports Java JDK 8 and 11, but the industry is moving towards newer Java versions like JDK 17 and JDK 21. To ensure that Liferay Cloud remains modern, allows our customers to leverage the newest security patches, and boosts overall performance.

A pack of improvements to the usability of the logs page. Clients now can troubleshoot more effectively, be it by better handling multiple filters or by selecting/copying logs without the use of the log inspector.

Feature Status change:

Tracking events related to non-default asset types and visualizing this data on a dashboard

Feature Status Change

Segments that are just static groups of users

Feature Status Change

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. Though the defined RESTful APIs and schemas, clients can perform CRUD operations to keep resources in sync.

Feature Status Change

The vendor has deprecated OpenSSO/OpenAM, so there is no reason for us to keep it. The alternative, which is PingAM can be integrated using our existing OpenID connector or SAML Authentication.

Feature Status Change

Enabling this feature will allow users to dynamically populate fields using expressions with information created from data filled and provided by other fields.

Feature Status Change

The Forms feature is going into maintenance.

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.

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

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.

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 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

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 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 feature enables users to export a CSV file containing detailed information about segment membership, including a list of all known individuals within a segment and their associated data, providing valuable insights for stakeholders.

Highlights:

• Export Capability: Allows users to generate a CSV file containing segment membership data.

• Comprehensive Details: Includes a list of all known individuals in a segment, with details such as names and email addresses.

• Actionable Insights: Equips stakeholders with valuable data for analysis and decision-making.

Users can access a new Performance tab on the Content Dashboard, which provides detailed metrics for assets, including visitor behavior and the top pages where each asset is featured. Data can be filtered by anonymous or known visitors. These metrics are available for Blogs, Documents and Media, and Web Content and are exclusively accessible to users connected to Analytics Cloud.

• This functionality refers to tracking events related to non-default asset types and visualizing the data on a dashboard. From now on, customers will no longer be able to use this specific method to track views of non-default asset types and visualize this data on a dashboard in Analytics Cloud

• Using custom event tracking is the recommended way to track your custom assets from now on.

• 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.

Default View and Download permissions for documents have been adjusted to match the behavior prior to the changes introduced in LPD-16744, restoring the expected user experience.

Highlights: 

• The View and Download permissions will be linked by default when uploading documents through the single and multiple file uploaders

• The Permissions configuration UI is improved so users can more easily recognize that the View and Download permissions are separate permissions

• The Download permission is now automatically included when a user shares a document and assigns permissions

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 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 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)

It is now possible to subscribe to documents and folders, allowing users to receive notifications when they are updated.

Highlights:

• Users can now subscribe to documents and folders through the “Subscribe” action and through the Subscribe icon in the Info Panel

• If a user subscribes to a folder, all documents and subfolders within it will be automatically subscribed to as well

During the publishing process, users can both define and manage permissions, as well as schedule publication dates for their web content. When creating content for the first time, users will have the opportunity to conveniently review and manage permissions. Furthermore, when editing previously created content, users can also adjust permissions directly from the editor view. Additionally, users can easily select the desired publication date for their content during the publishing process.

• 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