AEM 6.4 has reached the end of extended support and this documentation is no longer updated. For further details, see our technical support periods. Find the supported versions here.
The author environment allows for:
Authoring (including page authoring, managing assets, communities)
Administering tasks you need when generating and maintaining the content on your website
Two graphical user interfaces are provided to achieve this. These are accessible through any modern browser.
Touch-Enabled UI
This is the modern, default AEM UI.
It is predominantly grey, with a clean, flat interface.
Designed for use on both touch and desktop devices, the look and feel is the same on all devices, though viewing and selecting your resources differs slightly (taps versus clicks).
Classic UI
Although the touch-enabled UI is now the standard UI and feature parity has been nearly reached with the administration and editing of sites, there may be times when the user wishes to switch to the classic UI. There are several options for doing this.
For details on the status of feature parity with the classic UI, see the Touch UI Feature Parity document.
There are various locations where you can define which UI is to be used:
Configuring the default UI for your instance - This will set the default UI to be shown at user login, although the user may be able to override this and select a different UI for their account or current session.
Setting Classic UI Authoring for your account - This will set the UI to be used as default when editing pages, although the user can override this and select a different UI for their account or current session.
Switching to classic UI for the current session - This switches to the classic UI for the current session.
For the case of page authoring the system makes certain overrides in the relation to the UI.
Various options for switching to the classic UI are not immediately available out-of-the-box, they must be specifically configured for your instance.
See Enabling Access to Classic UI for more information.
Instances upgraded from a previous version will retain the classic UI for page authoring.
After upgrade, page authoring will not be automatically switched to the touch-enabled UI, but you can configure this using the OSGi configuration of the WCM Authoring UI Mode Service ( AuthoringUIMode
service). See UI Overrides for the Editor.
A system administrator can configure the UI that is seen at startup and login by using Root Mapping.
This can be overridden by user defaults or session settings.
Each user can access his/her user preferences to define if he/she wishes to use the classic UI for page authoring (instead of the default UI).
This can be overridden by session settings.
When using the touch-enabled UI desktop users might want to revert to the classic (desktop only) UI. There are several methods to switch to the classic UI for the current session:
Navigation Links
This option for switching to the classic UI is not immediately available out-of-the-box, it must be specifically configured for your instance.
See Enabling Access to Classic UI for more information.
If this is enabled, whenever you mouseover an applicable console, an icon appears (symbol of a monitor), tapping/clicking this will open the appropriate location in the classic UI.
For examples, the links from Sites to siteadmin:
URL
The classic UI can be accessed using the URL for the welcome screen at welcome.html
. For example:
http://localhost:4502/welcome.html
The touch-enabled UI can be accessed via sites.html
. For example:
http://localhost:4502/sites.html
This option for switching to the classic UI is not immediately available out-of-the-box, it must be specifically configured for your instance.
See Enabling Access to Classic UI for more information.
If enabled, Open the Classic UI is available from the Page Information dialog:
The settings defined by a user or system administrator can be overriden by the system in the case of page authoring.
When authoring pages:
Use of the classic editor is forced when accessing the page using cf#
in the URL. For example:
http://localhost:4502/cf#/content/geometrixx/en/products/triangle.html
Use of the touch-enabled editor is forced when using /editor.html
in the URL or when using a touch device. For example:
http://localhost:4502/editor.html/content/geometrixx/en/products/triangle.html
Any forcing is temporary and only valid for the browser session
editor.html
) or classic ( cf#
) is used.When opening pages through siteadmin
, checks will be made for the existence of:
AuthoringUIMode
service).If a user has already defined a preference for page authoring, that will not be overridden by changing the OSGi property.
Due to the use of cookies, as already described, it is not recommended to either: