AEM Headless CMS Developer Journey
Welcome to the documentation for developers who are new to Adobe Experience Manager headless CMS!
Learn about the powerful and flexible headless features, their capabilities, and how to use them on your first headless development project. This journey provides you with all the information you need to develop your first headless application.
Introduction
The Headless implementation of AEM uses Content Fragments Models and Content Fragments to focus on the creation of structured, channel-neutral, and reusable fragments of content and their cross-channel delivery. To achieve this it forgoes page and component management as is traditional in full stack solutions. It is a modern and dynamic development pattern for implementing digital experiences.
This guide leads you through headless implementation topics in AEM so when you are done you can:
- Have a full understanding of what headless content delivery is and its benefits.
- Understand AEM’s headless features and how they work together to deliver a headless experience.
- Take the first steps implementing your first AEM headless project.
TIPAudience
This journey is designed for the developer persona, laying out the requirements, steps, and approach of an AEM Headless project from a developer’s perspective. The journey defines additional personas with which the developer must interact for a successful project, but the point-of-view for the journey is that of the developer.
The following are the personas that interact in this journey.
| Persona | Description | Role in This Journey |
|---|---|---|
| Developer (target audience) | Has experience developing headless applications which consume content from different sources | Target audience of this journey |
| Content Author | Creates and manages content that is delivered headlessly | Content Authors create content that the developer delivers headlessly. |
| Administrator | Manages the base setup and configuration of AEM | The developer works with the administrator to make configuration changes needed for development. |
| Content Architect | Analyzes the requirements for the data that must be delivered headlessly and defines the structure for this data | Developers work with the content architect to understand the structure of the data and requirements for delivering it headlessly. |
The Headless Developer Journey
We will cover many topics in this journey, which will provide you with the foundational knowledge of headless in AEM.
Although you can go directly to a particular part of the journey, many concepts are built on ones in previous articles. Adobe recommends that you start at the beginning and progress sequentially.
| # | Article | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | AEM Headless Developer Journey | This document |
| 1 | Learn about CMS Headless Development | Learn about Headless Technology and when to use it. |
| 2 | Getting Started with AEM Headless as a Cloud Service | Learn about AEM Headless prerequisites |
| 3 | Path to your first experience using AEM Headless | Setup your development environment and learn how to integrate a simple app with AEM Headless |
| 4 | How to model your content | Learn how to model your content structure. |
| 5 | How to access your content via AEM delivery APIs | Learn how to use GraphQL queries to access your Content Fragments content. |
| 6 | How to update your content via AEM Assets APIs | Learn how to use REST API to access and update your Content Fragments content. |
| 7 | How to put it all together - your app and your content in AEM Headless | Learn how to take your AEM Project and prepare it for going live with the AEM Headless SDK. |
| 8 | How to go live with your headless application | Learn how to deploy the application live and take your local code in Git and move it to Cloud Manager Git for CI/CD pipeline. |
| 9 | Optional - How to create single page applications (SPAs) with AEM | Explore how to combine headful and headless delivery and learn how you can create editable SPAs using AEM’s SPA Editor framework. |