Liferay DXP 7.1 is now available and with it comes a wide array of new features and updates designed to put more useful tools in the hands of users than ever before.

Liferay DXP 7.1 is a platform designed to create a wide range of enterprise digital solutions, from innovative customer-facing websites to engaging global partner portals. Liferay DXP 7.1 launches new features for efficient, beautiful page design, as well as an extensive upgrade to the powerful forms feature. The business user experience has also been streamlined throughout the platform to help companies save time while managing their sites. The latest version also launches new tools to support data protection in accordance with the recent GDPR requirements.

Finally, there are several significant technological updates that empower companies to develop new competitive advantages with modern development tools for mobile and web. In order to help businesses better understand what 7.1 offers, this quick guide can help you better understand some of the new features and their benefits, which are detailed in full in our Liferay DXP 7.1 New Features Summary.

Website Management

Web management is designed to be easier than ever through the introduction and updates of various features meant to give more power and personalization options than ever before.

• Page Creation - Liferay DXP 7.1 introduces a powerful new way to design websites. From carefully designed page fragments to full control over page menus, Liferay DXP 7.1 frees web developers and designers to execute their visions for web experiences.
• Content Pages - Users can now easily create and add unstructured content directly to pages. This is useful for site pages that don’t need to leverage structured web content within Liferay, such as one-off landing pages for marketing campaigns.
• Fragments - Fragments are a new way of creating and implementing content page designs in Liferay through the Fragment Editor within the browser. Web developers can now save page sections as fragments and reuse them across a Liferay site.
• Updated Page Editor - The new Page Editor allows business users to visually lay out page designs and save them as reusable templates. Within this interface, users can search through collections and easily add, remove and position fragments on the page.

Navigation

The modern customer expects a smoother, faster and more intuitive online experience than ever before and updates to navigation within the Liferay ecosystem are designed to address those demands.

• Menus - Menus are now decoupled from page navigation for the freedom to create custom menus for sections of the site or remove menus for marketing landing pages. A new drag-and-drop interface allows easy management of menu hierarchies and saving different menu sets.
• Search - Liferay DXP 7.1 improves search administration and uses Elasticsearch 6 as the default search engine, giving users more options for implementing and managing enterprise search. A new control panel makes administration tasks easier and users can configure the search engine, start and monitor any reindexes and much more.

Administration

By providing greater power to the handling of data and the rules that govern a company’s online presence, users of Liferay DXP 7.1 have been given even greater control capabilities. These administrative updates help users maintain and improve their business solutions in ways that better serve both employees and audiences.

• Administration Improvements - Liferay DXP 7.1 improves the experience for business users. Streamlined administration tools allow companies to spend less time managing their sites, while still offering the granular control necessary for enterprises.
• Data Protection - Companies can now erase a user’s personal data and export data in a machine-readable format. Administrators can review content that potentially contains personal information and edit or delete as needed through a simple interface. Tools include APIs for implementation into third-party apps or overriding default app behavior.
• Forms - Forms have extensive new functionality, including a set of conditional rules that allows companies to design advanced forms that can create calculations, offer follow-up questions based on responses and much more. The interface has also been improved for better usability, with intuitive editing support. Liferay developers can use the new Rules API to create rules that will address any needs not covered out of the box.
• Modularity Update - New search applications such as Search Results, Search Bar and Category Facets allow greater flexibility in page construction. These come from the previous Search application, but have been divided into more useful components. Message board services have also been modularized and extracted for easy management and updates.

Mobile

A strong mobile experience is a crucial aspect of the modern customer journey. Through new developments in Liferay DXP 7.1, businesses can make effective improvements to their mobile strategy.

• Hybrid Mobile App Development Update - Liferay Screens 3.0 enables software developers to use Apache Cordova or Xamarin to build cross-platform applications from one codebase designed for the web on a PC and embed that content into a Screens app for mobile use. Sites and applications designed for PC can be rendered in screenlets with no additional code so native mobile capabilities and navigation can mix with HTML content seamlessly.
• Adaptive Media - Adaptive Media dynamically adjusts images to best fit the screen size of the device being used. It also offers deep control over how images are loaded and displayed to address performance issues. Adaptive Media automatically works in the background, but developers can edit image resolutions and define which devices should trigger various resolutions.