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The new Web Experience functionalities released in 7.1
In Liferay Portal 7.1 a lot of effort has been put in improving the experience of building sites and pages and, as a result, some new functionalities have been introduced to empower marketers and other business users in the creation of stunning websites.
We have achieved this by considering differentiated needs for the marketer, designer and web developer; and adding a new approach to content and page creation. We will continue working to expand the initiative in future releases, but some exciting features have already been introduced.
The key elements added to Web Experience under what we call Modern Site Building are Page Fragments, Content Pages, Display Pages and Multiple Navigation Menus. This is the first entry of a series of posts in which we will have the opportunity to go into more detail of each of those. But, as a starter, we will briefly introduce the big picture and how every component fits in it.
Authors, marketers, designers, HR teams or whoever is in charge of creating a piece of content or site pages sometimes face repeat work, but not always, right? Sometimes they are happy to use web content structures because content reusability sounds like pure magic. Some other times they wish there was a faster way to create pages because it is a one-off and what really matters is minimizing the number of clicks while making sure it looks awesome. Put simply, the needs are not always the same.
Liferay has always used a very content centric and decoupled approach. The creation of content in the form of different assets and the display of it have always been two separate things. Thus, the long-established approach to page creation with Liferay is by combining content and applications. These pages are flexible, powerful and offer advanced functionality; but also add complexity to some use cases.
For the new functionalities introduced we have considered a design and authoring flow like the one described below.
The marketer or the business user needs to create an effective landing page that communicates the desired message and increases customer engagement. The marketer does not have front-end knowledge but would like to have an interface to create site pages in a few clicks with editing options and making sure it looks great.
In order to achieve this, previous work of the Design and Web Development team is necessary. First of all, the designer designs several reusable page parts called Page Fragments (list of contents, headers, title sections, footers…).
The Web developer then implements these designs, coding the appearance and behavior of the Page Fragments and loads them into the Page Fragment collection library. Thereafter, the designer can create Page Templates by adding and combining Page Fragments, making a Page Template collection available for the marketer to directly start working on.
Using this approach, marketers will focus on writing content in Content Pages, using Page Templates created by designers which will consist of Page Fragments previously developed by web developers
With this authoring flow considered, we have introduced new functionalities attending to the different roles and responsibilities in the creation process:
Page Fragments, which are collections of “design blocks” created by web developers using HTML, CSS and JavaScript that are made available to the non-technical users to build the Pages by composing them.
Content Pages, a new way of creating pages with a few clicks. The main benefits of content page are the easy edition of its content directly on the page.
Display Pages, which allow to control how a particular content is displayed in full page.
Multiple Navigation Menus, that leverages the Navigation by allowing to introduce several Menus on the header, on the footer, sidebar...
To ease the Blank Page Syndrome you can start standing on some already defined examples. If you want to leverage on existing Page Fragment collections to start exploring the possibilities of the new features right away, you can already download the Fjord theme for Liferay Portal 7.1 from Liferay Marketplace. It contains a series of Page Fragments and Page Templates that can be used as a starter kit. More themes will follow soon!
Read along the coming series of posts to learn about Page Fragments, Content Pages, Display Pages and Multiple Navigation Menus.
Also, if you want to learn more about how to empower your team to build modern sites, you can sign in for free to the lesson on “Building Engaging Websites” available in Liferay University or accessing Liferay Documentation.
