AEM Headless Content Author Journey

Last update: March 5, 2025

Topics:
Headless,Content Fragments

CREATED FOR:

Admin
Developer
User
Leader

Start here for a guided journey through the powerful and flexible headless features of AEM, and how to author content for your headless project.

Introduction

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

Headless content is not based on the traditional structure of pages, and components. Instead it is based on the creation of channel-neutral, reusable fragments of content and their cross-channel delivery.

In AEM this is realized with Content Fragments. You author the content in individual Content Fragments that are then made available for an application to select and use as required.

This flexibility means that headless 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:

Have a basic 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.
Have the ability to author content for your 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 Author persona. As a Content Author you will be creating the actual content in Content Fragments.

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

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 Author 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 Author Journey	This document
1	Authoring for AEM Headless - An Introduction	An introduction to the headless features of Adobe Experience Manager, and how to author content for your project.
2	Authoring Basics for Headless with AEM	Learn about the concepts and mechanics of authoring content for your Headless CMS using Content Fragments.
3	Learn about using references in Content Fragments	Learn about how to use references in Content Fragments. These also let you create and manage multiple levels of structure for your Headless CMS using Nested Fragments.
4	Learn about defining Metadata and Tagging for Content Fragments	Learn about defining Metadata and Tagging for Content Fragments.

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 Authoring for AEM Headless - 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.
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.
Headless Architect Journey - Start here for an introduction to the powerful, and flexible, headless features of Adobe Experience Manager, and how to model content for your 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.
- An 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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