Universal Editor Introduction introduction

The Universal Editor is a versatile visual editor that is part of Adobe Experience Manager Sites. It enables authors to do what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editing of any headless or headful experience. Understand how it can help content authors deliver exceptional experiences and how it offers unparalleled freedom for developers.

Background background

The Universal Editor provides an efficient and intuitive in-context authoring experience that requires minimal training. With it, authors can manage their content directly in the context the web experience, exactly how it will appear to the visitors. Being a true editor as a service and overall more flexible, it intends to eventually supersede the Page Editor.

Authors benefit from the Universal Editor’s flexibility as it is supports same consistent visual editing for all forms of AEM content: in-place editing and layout composition is possible likewise for both content fragments and page components. The two forms of content can even be edited when showing up side by side in a web experience, without authors having to switch context. This is a tremendous improvement compared to previous editors in AEM only supported one type of content.

Developers benefit from Universal Editor’s versatility as it also supports true decoupling of the implementation. It allows developers to utilize virtually any framework or architecture of their choice, without imposing any SDK or technology constraints. This flexibility even makes it easy to instrument existing web apps for the universal editor without having to re-architecture them.

Truly Universal universal

The Universal Editor can be instrumented for any implementation, for any content, and for any aspect of the content.

Any Implementation any-implementation

Because experiences can be built in many different ways, any implementation can use the Universal Editor so authors can perform in-context editing.

Users often think that a headless implementation limits the authors to editing all content in a form-based UI, but this isn’t the case with the Universal Editor

The requirements for an implementation to use the Universal Editor is straight-forward and supports the following:

Any Content any-content

A content author should have the same powerful editing experience formerly offered by the AEM page editor. But the Universal Editor allows content authors to edit any content visually and in-context and supports:

Any Aspect any-aspect

For a content author, content is not just about the information contained, but how it is rendered and received. Content comes with additional meta-data and instrumentation rules, which the Universal Editor can understand and edit including:

Value value

By decoupling the content editing experience from any particular content delivery system, the editor becomes truly universal and flexible allowing the content author to delivery exceptional experiences, increase content velocity, and provides a state-of-the-art developer experience.

Universal Editor and the Content Fragment Editor universal-editor-content-fragment-editor

At first glance, it might seem like the Universal Editor and the Content Fragment Editor provide similar editing capabilities. However, these editors offer very different capabilities and they accomplish different jobs of the marketing practitioner.

Content Fragment Editor content-fragment-editor

A marketing practitioner wants to create content without having to care about its layout, so that it can be reused in numerous contexts of the experience.

Universal Editor universal-editor

A marketing practitioner wants to create content that is tailored to the layout of a given context to deliver an exceptional experience.

Limitations limitations

As you explore the Universal Editor and move forward implementing it in your own projects, please keep the following limitations in mind.

Next Steps next-steps

Please see the document Universal Editor Use Cases and Learning Paths to learn more about common use cases for the Universal Editor and to discover the right documentation resources to support you in your project.