Universal Editor for developers (deprecated)

Deprecation notice

Adobe Commerce no longer onboards new customers onto Universal Editor. For a visual authoring experience, use Experience Workspace instead.

Existing customers and those already implementing Universal Editor keep access to the tool.

→ Use Experience Workspace

New storefronts don’t include Universal Editor (UE) instrumentation by default. This reference is for existing projects that instrument content and Commerce blocks for UE. For setup, instrumentation syntax, and the custom block workflow, see the DA.live documentation below.

Document Authoring content source

This page covers UE setup for storefronts that use Document Authoring (DA.live) as the content source. If your project uses AEM Sites instead, the instrumentation differs, and you should follow the Universal Editor blocks guide on aem.live.

Commerce boilerplate structure

Commerce differs from the standard DA.live approach (centralized ue/models/blocks/ in da-block-collection ): UE instrumentation JSON files live next to each block at blocks/{block-name}/_{block-name}.json. A pre-commit hook composes these into the root-level component-*.json files the UE consumes.

aem-boilerplate-commerce/
├── component-definition.json    ← generated (UE consumes)
├── component-filters.json       ← generated (UE consumes)
├── component-models.json        ← generated (UE consumes)
├── models/
│   └── _section.json           ← add new blocks to component list
└── blocks/
    ├── accordion/
    │   └── _accordion.json      ← UE instrumentation
    ├── hero/
    │   └── _hero.json
    ├── product-recommendations/
    │   └── _product-recommendations.json
    ├── commerce-cart/
    │   └── _commerce-cart.json
    └── ...                      ← and other blocks with _*.json

Tip

While you are developing, open a page in the Universal Editor. Blocks without instrumentation appear as (no definition) in the content tree, which is a quick visual signal that a definition file is needed.

Documentation

• Setup Universal Editor — First-time setup: editor.path config, requirements, and behavior
• Universal Editor developer reference — full instrumentation reference
• models/_section.json — add new blocks to this component list
• For the current content-authoring workflow, see Experience Workspace.