How the Universal Editor Publishes Content

Last update: February 24, 2025

CREATED FOR:

  • Admin
  • Developer

Learn how how the Universal Editor publishes its content, how it differs from the process in the Sites Console, and considerations when developing your own apps to work with it.

TIP
This article covers details of the Universal Editor’s publishing process for the developer. For the content author, the process of publishing your content is described here.

Similarities with the Sites Console Process

For users of the AEM Page Editor and Sites Console, the process to publish content with the Universal Editor works as you are accustomed: on publication in AEM, the content is replicated from the author service to the publish service (or to the preview service if available and depending on the options the author chooses when publishing.)

Differences

What makes publishing with the Universal Editor a bit different is not so much the editor itself, but rather the external hosting of the app that the Universal Editor makes possible.

When externally hosted, it is the concern of the web app to ensure that content is loaded from the author service when the app is opened by authors within the editor, and is loaded from the publish service when the app is accessed by visitors.

Detecting the Service in the App

Determining whether the author or publishing service should be accessed can be accomplished by a simple conditional statement in the app to choose the appropriate author or publish endpoint when detecting that its being opened within the editor.

Another option is to deploy the app to two different environments that are configured differently, so that one retrieves its content from the author service, and one that retrieves it from the publish service. To allow authors to open the published URL in the Universal Editor, a small script can be created to “convert” the publish-side URL to its equivalent on the author environment (for example, by prepending an author sub-domain), so that the authors are automatically redirected.

Summary

The objective of the Universal Editor is to not impose any particular pattern, so that the implementation can best achieve its goals in a fully-decoupled manner while still keeping everything simple and straight-forward for the implementation.

Likewise the Universal Editor does not make any requirements on how any particular project should go about determining from which service to delivery the content. Rather it enables several possibilities and allows the project to determine which solution is best for its own requirements.

Additional Resources

To learn more about the technical details of the Universal Editor, please see these developer documents.

Experience Manager