Ruminating on Liferay CMS

It had been a few years since I had last used Liferay portal. Today my team members demonstrated the simplicity of the CMS (content management system) features of Liferay 6.2 and I was mighty impressed with what I saw.

First and foremost, Liferay's MVC portlet concept makes writing custom portlets so easy. I still remember the struggles we had to go through to code against the initial portlet API a decade ago. But now in Liferay, anyone who understands the MVC design pattern, can quickly product portlets with blinding speed.

Next, I found the CMS of Liferay very simple to understand and intuitive to use. Liferay makes it easy to quickly create and add a web page. Basic content management capabilities are so easy to add; using the Web Content Display application plugin. A 'Web Content' UI component can have a structure and a template. The structure contains the data and meta-data of the content. The templates are instructions for how to display structures, written in Freemarker or Velocity template engine language.

We also have page templates and site templates. There is first class support for themes at the page level as well as the site level.

Document management capabilities are integrated with the core product. Liferay’s content management system manages all file types including images, documents, videos, and web content. 

Difference beween WCM and ECM

Doing some research on Content Management systems, I got a bit confused about the difference between Web content management systems and Enterprise Content Management systems.

This article is a good read to understand and appreciate the differences.
The lines between all content technology families are very blurry and hence the auhor suggests that we evaluate a product based on the scenario requirement.

For publishing company websites, intranet sites, a WCM may be a good solution. A ECM solution may be focussed towards a particular industry.