Liferay Portal provides out-of-the-box CMS functionality in two major areas: document management (repositories for documents and images) and publishing.
Document management is provided through Liferay's Document Library and Image Gallery portlets. These portlets provide intuitive management of Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, text files, and images.
Publishing in Liferay Portal is accomplished through Liferay's Journal portlet. It features a clean separation between content (data entry) and presentation (layout design). This allows the content to conform to a consistent "look and feel." Additionally, the Journal portlet provides a content versioning and approval paradigm (workflow). This system allows for users involved in publishing to fall naturally into three different roles:
Writers create, edit, and enter content comprised of text and images
Designers create layouts that display content
Editors edit and approve final output and release it for publication to the portal
As an example, consider our website. All of the static content is managed and published by the Journal portlet. We can authorize other members of the Liferay community to write documentation, but we retain final editorial authority and security. This also allows for a mixture of portlets and Journal articles to coexist, enabling the designer to be more creative with what is displayed. Designers can integrate static content using the Journal Content portlet with a number of other function-rich portlets (e.g. Navigation and Breadcrumb). All of this show how useful and flexible publishing can be with the Journal portlet.