AEM Headless Content Architect Journey

Last update: March 5, 2025

Topics:
Headless,Content Fragments

CREATED FOR:

Admin
Developer

Start here for a guided journey through the powerful and flexible headless features of AEM, their capabilities, and how to use them on your first headless project.

Introduction

Headless implementation is increasingly becoming important for delivering experiences to your audience, wherever they are and regardless of channel.

Headless implementation forgoes page and component management as is traditional in full stack solutions and focuses on the creation of channel-neutral, reusable fragments of content and their cross-channel delivery. It is a modern and dynamic development pattern for implementing digital experiences.

This guide leads you through the most important topics so that on completion you:

Understand what headless content delivery is and its benefits.
Understand how to model your content for AEM’s headless features.
Have the ability to take the first steps modeling your content for your first AEM headless project.

AEM Documentation Journeys

A Documentation Journey ties together many different and perhaps complicated topics and features by providing a narrative that helps the reader, who can be new to AEM, understand and solve a business problem from beginning to end, while assuming minimal prior topic or AEM knowledge.

Documentation Journeys are designed around best practices principles, informed by Adobe’s latest research, proven implementation experience from Adobe consultants, and feedback from customer projects.

If you want to know how Adobe recommends how to solve headless business cases with AEM, AEM Headless Journeys are where to start.

Audience

This journey is designed for the Content Architect persona. As a Content Architect you will be defining the structure of the content. These definitions will then be used by the Content Authors, when they create the actual content.

The journey lays out the requirements, steps, and approach of an AEM Headless project from the perspective of a Content Architect. The journey will define additional personas with which the content architect must interact for a successful project, but the point-of-view for the journey is that of the content architect.

Information in this journey can be useful to other personas, but some information will be superfluous to certain roles. Stay tuned for forthcoming journeys covering additional roles.

The Headless Content Architect Journey

You will explore many topics in this journey. The following articles give you foundational knowledge of headless in AEM and link out to detailed technical documentation.

Although you can go directly to a particular part of the journey, many concepts build on ones in previous articles. Therefore if you are new to headless in AEM, Adobe recommends that you start at the beginning and progress sequentially.

#	Article	Description
0	AEM Headless Content Architect Journey	This document
1	Modeling for Headless with AEM - An Introduction	Learn about Headless Technology and what it means for modeling.
2	Learn modeling Basics	Learn the basics of modeling with AEM
3	How to build model structures	Learn how to model structures with multiple layers for headless

What’s Next

You are now ready to get started on your Adobe Headless journey. We encourage you to continue on to the next part of the journey and read the article Content Modeling for Headless with AEM - An Introduction.

Additional Resources

Documentation journeys show you how AEM solves a business problem by providing a narrative that guides you through complex, interrelated processes and features. A journey illustrates how multiple features work together to serve a single business need.

As such, journeys are designed to stand on their own. However, several them can be related to each other. Check out these additional journeys for more information on how AEM’s powerful features work together.

AEM Headless Translation Journey - This documentation journey gives you a broad understanding of headless technology, how AEM serves headless content, and how you can translate it.
Headless Authoring Journey - Start here for a guided journey through the powerful and flexible headless features of AEM, their capabilities, and how to model your content on your first headless project.
AEM Headless Developer Journey - Start here for a guided journey through the powerful and flexible headless features of AEM, their capabilities, and how to use them on your first development project.
AEM technical documentation - If you already have a firm understanding of AEM and headless technologies, you may want to directly consult our in-depth technical docs.
- Introduction to AEM as a Headless CMS
AEM Headless tutorials - If you prefer to learn by doing and are technically inclined, take our hands-on tutorials organized by API and framework, that explore creating and using applications built on AEM Headless.
AEM Developer Portal

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