Hi, Liferay!

I want to introduce you to the new Content Dashboard that we added back in the 7.3 GA4 release. We’ve kept working on it ‘til the very end of the GA6 and it’s grown up a lot!!  Also last week at the dev/24 we had the opportunity to see how some members of the Community (thanks @Sébastien Le Marchand) are already extending its capabilities, so we can’t be happier. Be sure that we will keep working on some of the proposed improvements!

In the meantime, we are keen to hear your feedback and want to encourage you to try Content Dashboard out and tell us what you think!

TL; DR

The Content Dashboard is a new global application that helps users to manage their content. It aims to be a one-stop-place where content authors and marketers will be able to access all the contents generated by them or other users, not only for a given site, but for all the sites in a Liferay instance. It includes also a tool for auditing web content categorized under global vocabularies, and cool metrics on content performance.

Why?

We thought of the content dashboard for covering mainly three use cases:

• For content authors, being the main place to access all their content, in order to edit, view or check performance.
• For marketers, searching for content regardless of the site or asset publisher it is contained in so it can be reused for campaign purposes.
• For both of them, auditing content to assess and improve content strategy execution

That’s why:

• It’s an instance level application, so content can be accessed regardless of the site /Asset Publisher it is contained in.
• A good set of filters is provided, considering that all web contents of any instance will be displayed
• It consists of two sections: the list of contents, and the audit graph, aka Content Audit Tool.

By now the Content Dashboard includes only web content, but as we extend asset analytics capabilities, also documents and media might be featured.

How does it work?

The all-content view in the main section is a table with relevant information on each of the featured web contents, such as title, author or subtype, among others. As we’ve said earlier, it is possible to search by title, filter by multiple fields and order by title and modified date. 

Depending on the permissions of the user, it is also allowed to perform different actions with the web content in each row of the table, such as viewing, editing, or getting the content’s full details on a side panel.

The Content Audit Tool in the top section contains a graph that calculates the number of existing assets for each combination of categories in the featured global vocabularies (we’ve also made some changes there… Please check this video for further information). The graph can be configured so users can select which vocabularies to display and audit the content they need. 

But, what is a content audit exactly? 

A Content audit is the way that content teams have to assess their content strategy execution. They run content audits on a regular basis and review all content generated according to the topic, audience and funnel stage at which it is targeted. This way they’re able to spot gaps, identify areas of interest and learn from the best performing content.

With our Content Audit Tool, content teams are able to run content audits whenever they need to.

To see contents represented in the graph, the first thing to be done is to add some categories to the OOTB Global Vocabularies, and then assign them to the web contents. You can also create your own Global Vocabularies or edit the existing ones, but be aware that just Global Vocabularies can be selected on the graph configuration. 

Once you have the web content with Global categories assigned to it, the graph will show by default the Audience and Stage categories. It can be changed at any moment by clicking on Configuration on the top right of the page. Also, you can change the vocabulary displayed in each of the axes by ordering the selected vocabularies. You can watch this video to learn more.  

This way content teams can run quantitative content audits in order to understand how many contents they have for each one of their defined audiences, stages, or topics (or whichever vocabularies they’ve created to categorize their contents) and assess their content strategy execution to fill in gaps or search for areas of improvement.

Content Performance

But the other part of content audits is evaluating the performance of contents. Ideally it is done by groups of assets - be it by category, asset type or author. We didn’t get so far for the 7.3, but we did include content performance metrics in the Content Dashboard. The new Content Performance Panel showing in display pages is also accessible from here by clicking on the Metrics option on those web contents with an associated display page. DXP has to be connected and synced to AC in order to see the metrics.

Where can I find this awesome application?

You can access the content dashboard through Applications Menu > Applications tab.

You should also know...

• Graph in the Content Audit Tool will be empty until categories are created in the Global Vocabularies and then assigned to content. You can watch this video to learn more: https://liferay.wistia.com/medias/96xce3gric 
• So far we’ve just included web content in the Content Dashboard, so be aware that blogs and documents won’t be featured - neither in the list nor in the graph. We keep working to extend the application’s capabilities.
• We’ve made some user tests (thank you Miriam Manso) and as a result we are working on some UX improvements, mainly for the graph section. We’ll update you on this when we are done.
  
   

Thanks for all the work to Tango Team, Echo Team, Lima Team, Angelo Youn and Miriam Manso!