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.

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.

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 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

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