Liferay Journal is now Liferay Web Content Management

When Brian Chan first started working on Liferay in 2000, one of the immediate goals was to use Liferay to build a public website for his church. Of course, as a portal-based website, it would have additional personalization capabilities, and one need was to allow individual users to keep a daily record of what they've done, much like what we now know as blogs. Hence, the web publishing component of Liferay was named "Journal."
 
Since its humble beginnings, Liferay Journal has grown into a full-fledged web content management system, used in production by enterprises (and non-profits) and with the standard stable of enterprise features. In fact, many use Liferay as a web content management system without knowing about all of our portal and collaboration capabilities. 
 
Over the years, some people have had trouble finding our WCM, not realizing it's called "Journal." Also, with the rise of blogs and the introduction of our own collaboration suite, the Journal nomenclature has increasingly become a point of confusion.
 
 
In 5.2 we'll be releasing the Liferay Control Panel, a single interface that consolidates all Liferay administration portlets, and since the "Journal" portlet is part of that change, we've finally decided to rename Journal. So let me be the first to proudly (re) introduce Liferay Web Content Management (WCM), a full enterprise solution for web publishing that's already being used in production to deliver great websites, including: 
 
If you're running your website on Liferay Web Content Management, feel free to email us at  pr@liferay.com to let us know. Meanwhile, here's a rundown of the great features of Liferay WCM:
  • Web 2.0 features like RSS, tagging, comments and ratings. Of course you can also enhance your site with the Liferay Collaboration suite of features.
  • Friendly URLs, Site Maps, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can also easily add Google Analytics to your Liferay-powered website through an administrative interface. In future versions we'll have deeper reporting and user tracking capabilities built in.
  • Support for dynamic virtual hosting. A single Liferay instance can host thousands of website instances, each with a unique domain. See MusicToday for a great example of this use case.
  • Full localization capabilities for article elements. That means each block of text and each image can be localized. We find Liferay-based public websites built in countries as diverse as Hungary, Iran, China, France, Kazakhstan, Germany, Vietnam, and about 40 other countries beyond. 
  • Common content meta-data usage for mixed-content publishing scenarios. You can access blogs, web content, documents, wiki pages, and bookmarks through the Asset Publisher portlet, which will find content assets dynamically according to meta-data, tags, or other criteria.
  • Multi-stage content staging and publishing. Liferay allows you to define publishing workflow that tracks changes to web content as well as the pages of the site in which they live. These changes are staged by users with specific roles in a non-production environment. After up to three stages of approval, the result can then be published—immediately or on a schedule—to either the same or a remote server instance. 
  • Structured content with inheritance and dynamic lists. This means you can define article types with set elements (such as title, headline, sub-headline, body text, image, caption) as well as dynamic element collections. For example, for an article that displays news items, users can add additional news items (including title, link, and summary) as a set of elements, and add any number of them.
  • Script-level access to the Liferay API. Users of Liferay Web Content Management can access any business tier services from our Velocity-based article templates. This means you can access users, documents, portal pages, content and other elements directly from your web content to quickly put together pages with dynamic content. This even works for Liferay plug-ins. For example, Liferay's public website lists our public training dates, which are defined in a separate plug-in with its own data model.
  • Versioning, publication and expiration dates for full control over your site's publishing behavior.
And of course, Liferay Web Content Management is part of Liferay Portal, which means you get all the SOA, web services, user management, integration, collaboration and social computing capabilities of our flagship product alongside your website. 
 
We'll be migrating our marketing literature over to the new nomenclature, but in the meantime, the name change has been committed to our SVN and will be released with Liferay Portal 5.2. Enjoy!
 
Blogs
Also, for the technically inclined, here are the name changes:

Journal Content => Web Content Display
Journal Articles => Web Content List
Journal Content Search => Web Content Search
Journal => Web Content (this portlet is meant to be used from the Control Panel now)

Some wanted to call the last one "Web Content Admin" but since it will be accessed from the Control Panel, the "Administration" part is implied by the context.

I'll leave it to one of the engineers to talk about the changes to the API and our deprecation plans.
Thank you, Bryan,

It is very good to change names:

Journal Content => Web Content Display
Journal Articles => Web Content List
Journal Content Search => Web Content Search
Journal => Web Content

Now we have Web Content Management (WCM) in Liferay 5.2.* :-)
Hi Bryan,

Cool......
unfortunately on the latest trunk I have found an issue. adding a webcontent does not open the editor. I have made LPS-1642 for this.
Hi Bryan, this is really cool post. I think the Web Content Management is the best way of describing the functionality for the "Business Users" who are looking for such framework.

Two key features - (a) Dynamic virtual hosting (b) Multi-stage content staging and publishing are very much support what is needed for an Enterprise WCM.

Thanks for sharing the reference implementations which provides a COMFORT level to the new businesses to adopt Liferay.
Hi Bryan,
How can I set the value using the Web Content API manually?

I have one requirement like, I have one portlet which sends email and on click of submit button in my portlet the message should display automatically in side the web content display portlet and asset publisher portlet?
how can i define a workflow for web content (eg. where the author creates a web content , then the content goes for approval and the approved content goes for publishing )

i tried with creating roles like author , editor and approver.
and gave them permissions accordingly.but that is not what i want.

plzz reply
Hi, do I have to migrate journal articles / structures build with 5.1.2 to the new Liferay Web Content Management stucture when updating to 5.2?
@Jenny: 5.1.2 articles, structures, and templates are fully upgradeable to 5.2. This change is just on the front-end. There are other enhancements to WCM between 5.1.2 and 5.2, but these are automatically upgraded.

@Ton: 5.2 is planned for release within one week.