CIGNEX Datamatics: a headless-capable content platform on Liferay DXP for web, mobile and third-party channels
India / USA
An open-source and digital transformation specialist needed a CMS that could serve complex, multilingual content to enterprise clients over APIs, not just as web pages. ATS architected it on Liferay DXP with REST and headless APIs, fragment-based page building and automated publishing — and migrated the legacy content without losing a record.
The challenge
A legacy CMS with no API, and content that had to go everywhere
CIGNEX Datamatics manages complex content hierarchies and multilingual sites for enterprise clients. Its legacy CMS platforms were expensive to maintain and, more fundamentally, not built API-first: content authored for the web could not easily be delivered to mobile apps or third-party applications. As clients asked for the same content on more channels, the cost of working around that grew.
The new platform had to do three things at once — manage deep content hierarchies with multilingual variants, deliver that content dynamically over APIs to any channel, and speed up the publishing operation itself. It also had to be migrated from the legacy systems without losing content. ATS's Liferay DXP practice designed and built it as a headless-capable platform.
Our approach
Headless-capable, not headless-only
Delivered by our Liferay DXP practice.
ATS architected the Liferay DXP content platform so that every piece of content is available two ways: rendered by Liferay for the web, and served over REST and headless APIs to mobile and third-party applications. That hybrid is deliberate. Editors keep Liferay's page building and workflow; developers on other channels get clean JSON. Nothing has to be authored twice.
For the editorial side, ATS built custom content templates for the client's content types, fragment-based page building so that pages are assembled from reusable fragments rather than hand-built, and automated publishing workflows that move content from draft to review to live without manual hand-offs. Multilingual management handles the language variants within the same structure rather than as parallel sites.
- Headless CMS architecture: web rendering plus REST and headless APIs from one content store
- Custom content templates for the client's content hierarchies
- Fragment-based page builder for reusable, editor-assembled pages
- Automated publishing workflows
- Multilingual content management across 12 language variants
- Migration from the legacy CMS with content integrity verified end to end
Architecture
Liferay DXP with a React front end and Spring Boot services
Liferay DXP is the content platform and system of record, with MySQL behind it. Content is exposed through Liferay's REST and headless APIs. React is used for the front-end experiences built on those APIs, and Spring Boot provides the service layer where integration and custom logic sit outside the CMS. The codebase is built with Gradle and managed in GitHub.
This is what made new channels cheap to add: a channel is a consumer of the existing API, not a new content pipeline. It is the pattern described on our Liferay headless integration page, and one we have also applied on mobile-first Liferay work such as Conscious Connects.
Building blocks
- Liferay DXP · MySQL · Gradle · GitHub
- REST and headless APIs for omnichannel delivery
- React front-end experiences consuming the APIs
- Spring Boot service layer for integration and custom logic
- Fragment-based page builder, content templates and publishing workflow inside Liferay
Technology stack
What changed
Faster publishing, three new channels, nothing lost in the move
Automated publishing workflows reduced content publishing time by 65%. The API-first architecture enabled content delivery to three new digital channels without re-authoring. Multilingual content management was deployed across 12 language variants.
The migration from the legacy CMS completed with zero content data loss — the outcome that matters most to a content business, and the reason the migration was planned and verified as carefully as the platform was built. For the broader pattern, see Liferay headless & API integration; for another production migration completed with full data integrity, see be'ah Oman.
Key results
Content publishing time reduced by 65% through automated workflows
API-first architecture enabled content delivery to 3 new digital channels
Multilingual content management deployed across 12 language variants
Migration from legacy CMS completed with zero content data loss
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