Authoring a page

For an AEM Sites content author, some of the day to day activities involves creating a page, making changes to an existing page and publishing your changes to an external user. In this video let me take you through the journey of how to author content for an AEM Sites page.

From your AEM homepage, navigate to AEM Sites console and open the WKND sample site.

As a content author we have been assigned a task to author content for a new WKND site adventure page for river rafting, created using a page template. Let’s browse through the site content hierarchy to find the page. Take a note of the page title and the page template used to create this page.

Select the page and click on the edit icon from the top toolbar. You can notice the page open in a new tab with the edit mode being selected by default.

How do we recognize that the page is in the edit mode? On the top right side of your page you can see a page view dropdown, right next to the preview option. Click on the dropdown and make sure that the page is in edit mode. This is a brand new page, but you can see some content exists already.

For example, you can see a header component and a footer component already added to your page by the template.

Components are elements provided by AEM so that you can add specific type of content to your page. AEM comes with a range of out of the box components that provide comprehensive functionality. The chosen page template for our page added few additional components like a carousel component with an image component embedded. The title component uses the page title the we provided when creating a page and displays it on our page. Some of the content for the component has already populated.

But a content author can overwrite these values if it is necessary, using each component’s settings. You can also notice the layout container which allows users to add additional components for page authoring.

Now that we have a list of components added to our page, what if we want to add more content to this page? When using a template for creating a page, it does add some content to a page at the same time, provides a set of additional components that we can use to author content. Click on the rail selector and you can see a page side click that opens up the asset finder selected by default. Click on the components icon and you can see a list of components as part of the template for us to author content. You can filter the components using the search bar. In order for us to add some textual content to our page, we need to add a text component. Let’s search for a text component using the component finder window. To add the WKND text component to our page, we can simply drag-drop the component onto the layout container. We now have a text component added to our sites page. Click on the rich text component and select the pencil icon from the components toolbar to add some textual content to our page. Optionally, we can add some text formatting. Each component provides a set of toolbar options to interact with the component.

Clicking again, or initially selecting the component, with a slow double click or double tap will open in-place editing, which has it’s own toolbar. Here you can edit the content and make basic formatting changes. Now we have added some content relevant to river rafting. To make our content more appealing, let’s add some relevant image to our image component. Click on the rail selector again and this time let’s select the asset finder. Before we start adding content to our page, I’m going to introduce you to another AEM solution called AEM Assets. AEM Assets provide all digital assets required for page authoring. Solutions within AEM are well-integrated, making AEM Assets available within AEM Sites page editor window for ease of use and improves overall page authoring experience. AEM let’s you quickly search for assets or components without having to remember the location of where assets are stored. You can also filter assets based on its type. AEM’s powerful search capabilities comes handy here. Let’s search for river rafting images using the asset finder filter and simply drag-drop the image onto the image component. I think it’s time to preview our changes. Let’s click on the preview option and you can get a quick glimpse of how your content would look for external visitors when the content gets published. I hope this video helps you author a page using components and assets for your organization. -