Editable Templates editable-templates

Learn about how editable templates are used when creating a page, defining its initial content, structured content, authoring policies, and layout.

Overview overview

When creating a page you need to select a template. The page template is used as the base for the new page. The template can define the structure of the resultant page, any initial content, and the components that can be used (design properties).

Pages templates used to create pages editable with the Universal Editor use a limited subset of editable template functionality. Therefore, the remainder of this document focuses on editable templates used to create pages that are editable with the Page Editor.

Editable Templates and Pages Edited with the Page Editor page-editor

When creating templates for creating pages that are editable with the Page Editor, normally specialized authors are identified.

With editable templates, the pieces that make a page are isolated within components. You can configure the necessary combinations of components in a UI, thereby eliminating the need for a new page component to be developed for each page variation.

This document:

Creating a New Editable Template creating-a-new-template

Creating editable templates is primarily done with the template console and template editor by a template author. This section gives an overview of this process and follows with a description of what occurs at a technical level.

When creating an editable template you:

Template Folders template-folders

For organizing your templates you can use the following folders:

In a standard AEM instance the global folder already exists in the template console. This holds default templates and acts as a fallback if no policies and/or template-types are found in the current folder. You can add your default templates to this folder or create a folder (recommended).

Template types and policies are inherited across all folders according to the following order of precedence:

A list of all allowed entries is created. If any configurations overlap ( path/ label), only the instance closest to the current folder is presented to the user.

To create a folder, you can either do this:

Using CRXDE Lite using-crxde-lite

Using the Configuration Browser using-the-configuration-browser

ACLs and Groups acls-and-groups

Once your template folders are created (either via CRXDE or with the Configuration Browser), ACLs must defined for the appropriate groups for the template folders to ensure proper security.

The template folders for the WKND tutorial can be used as an example.

The template-authors Group the-template-authors-group

The template-authors group is the group used to manage access to templates and comes standard with AEM, but is empty. Users must be added to the group for the project/site.

The following table details the necessary permissions for template editing.

This default template-authors group only covers the project setups, where all template-authors members are allowed to access and author all templates. For more complex setups, where multiple template authors groups are needed to separate access to templates, more custom template authors groups must be created. However the permissions for the template authors groups would still be the same.

Template Type template-type

When creating a template you need to specify a template type:

The out-of-the box template types are stored under:

Your site-specific template types should be stored in the comparable location of:

Definitions for your customized templates types should be stored in user-defined folders (recommended) or alternatively in global. For example:

Creating Template Types creating-template-types

If you have created a template that can serve as the basis of other templates, you can copy this template as a template type.

You can also develop your own template type using an example editable template as a basis, available on GitHub.

CODE ON GITHUB

You can find the code of this page on GitHub

Template Definitions template-definitions

Definitions for editable templates are stored user-defined folders (recommended) or alternatively in global. For example:

The root node of the template is of type cq:Template with a skeleton structure of:

<template-name>
  initial
    jcr:content
      root
        <component>
        ...
        <component>
  jcr:content
    @property status
  policies
    jcr:content
      root
        @property cq:policy
        <component>
          @property cq:policy
        ...
        <component>
          @property cq:policy
  structure
    jcr:content
      root
        <component>
        ...
        <component>
      cq:responsive
        breakpoints
  thumbnail.png

The main elements are:

jcr:content jcr-content

This node holds properties for the template:

Structure structure

Defines the structure of the resultant page:

Initial Content initial-content

Defines the initial content that a new page will have upon creation:

Layout layout

When editing a template you can define the layout, this uses standard responsive layout, which can be configured on the page by the content author.

Content Policies content-policies

The content policies define the design properties of a component. For example, the components available or minimum/maximum dimensions. These are applicable to the template (and pages created with the template). Content policies can be created and selected in the template editor.

Page Policies page-policies

Page policies allow you to define the content policy for the page (main parsys), in either the template or resultant pages.

Enabling and Allowing a Template for Use enabling-and-allowing-a-template-for-use

Resultant Content Pages resultant-content-pages

Pages created from editable templates:

The above diagram shows how templates, content, and components interrelate:

When rendering a page:

Template Availability template-availability

When creating a page in the site admin interface, the list of available templates depends on the location of the new page and the restrictions on placement specified in each template.

The following properties determine whether a template T is allowed to be used for a new page to be placed as a child of page P. Each of these properties is a multi-value string holding zero or more Regular Expressions that are used for matching with paths:

The evaluation works as follows:

The following diagram depicts the template evaluation process:

Limiting templates used in child pages limiting-templates-used-in-child-pages

To limit what templates can be used to create child pages under a given page, use the cq:allowedTemplates property of jcr:content node of the page to specify the list of templates to be allowed as child pages. Each value in the list must be an absolute path to a template for an allowed child page, for example, /apps/wknd/templates/page-content.

You can use the cq:allowedTemplates property on the template’s jcr:content node to have this configuration applied to all created pages that use this template.

If you want to add more constraints, for example, regarding the template hierarchy, you can use the allowedParents/allowedChildren properties on the template. You can then explicitly specify that pages created from a template T have to be parents/children of pages created from a template T.