AEM - HEADLESS CMS

 

AEM - HEADLESS CMS

1.                 What is Headless CMS?

Headless CMS doesn’t have a User Interface, or presentation/rendering layer and delivers “raw” content from a CMS to various channels or rendering engines.

AEM can act as:

i)                    Traditional CMS

ii)                  Headless CMS

 

TRADITIONAL CMS                                                      HEADLESS CMS

 

 

iii)                Hybrid CMS - Experience Manager takes a hybrid approach that offers the best of both worlds: the efficiency and ease of use of a traditional CMS combined with the flexibility and scalability of a headless development framework.

 

Architecture of Hybrid System

Customers are using various devices so to have consistency to deliver the content on various channels.

 

 

Challenges –

 

·                     How to manage content for all these channels?

·                     How to deliver content to all these different channels?

 

Multichannel content delivery in Experience Manager

 

To support all channels, CMSs must expose the content they manage in a multi format and scalable way.

 

There are two standard formats for exposing web content: HTML and JSON.

 

HTML has long been the language of the web browser, while JSON is a lightweight delivery format that powers modern connected applications.

 

Components can reference and reuse content abstraction features, such as content fragments, experience fragments, and assets, within the same channel or across channels.

 

Content fragment and experience fragment components

 

Experience Manager extends the same component structure and flexibility to content fragments and experience fragments.

 

Since the content of the fragment itself is read-only when referenced via a component, authors create and update content directly in the fragment, promoting content consistency and reuse.

 

All of the content is maintained in the DAM system with content fragments; background processes ensure that as authors update content fragments, any references are also updated.

 

Delivering content in JSON with Experience Manager content services

 

Experience Manager content services is a zero-code framework that exposes content in a standard JSON format.

 

Experience Manager Content services builds on top of Apache Sling Model Exporter and provides its own JSON schema for components that implement its interfaces.

 

Content services still leverages Experience Manager Templates, pages, and components, but outputs to JSON instead of HTML.

 

Key considerations— Content fragment components for JSON:

 • Are a subset of Experience Manager Core components available on GitHub?

 • Automatically expose content as JSON as a part of content services

Experience Manager includes features that express content in a variety of formats through API endpoints:

·      Content services exposes content via HTTP APIs using a standard JSON schema, enabling brands to expose content to any channel without coding.

·       Sling Model Exporter allows developers to quickly render any Experience Manager content into JSON using custom business logic

The following Experience Manager Capabilities and features support fluid experiences:

 

1)      Experience Manager Assets offers seamless access to image, video, and document assets across organizations, partners, teams, and channels. Marketers and creative teams can work side by side to generate and deliver engaging content.

2)      Content fragments is a design- and presentation-agnostic set of content. Content fragments can contain unstructured data, for example, text and images, or structured data elements based on a data model.

3)      Experience fragments combine several pieces of content, such as text and images, to form an experience that makes sense on its own. They include design and layout information.

 

 Content Fragments Types:

 

·         Unstructured content fragments are ideal for articles or other long forms of text

·         Structured content fragments are ideal for business-specific data.

 

 

Content fragment models define the data schema for a content fragment and contain the following fields:

 

• Text

• Multiline text

• Number

• Boolean

• Date and time

• Enumeration

• Tags

• Reference

 

Experience Fragments combines one or more pieces of content with design and layout.

 

Experience fragments allow marketers to manage experiences from a central location and ensure a consistent message while delivering contextually optimized content to each channel.

 

While experience fragments define standalone experiences, they are designed to optimize display for different channels, such as a web page, social feed, mobile app, or IoT device.

 

Experience fragments, like content fragments, are composed of one or more variations, each addressing a different context or channel, optimizing the presentation of the core experience to best align with the channel and its audience. 

Most experience fragment variations are web based and intended for a browser.

Experience Manager provides variations for social posting to Facebook and Pinterest out of the box.