Authoring Best Practices

[paulmi319]

Hi. Is there a forum for authoring best practices and/or tips and tricks? For example, what's the general consensus on giving aurhors the ability to add raw html to pages within AEM? What are some alternatives?

Thanks!

[smacdonald2008]

This would be that forum. This is the AEM forum and handles such questions. I will post some good resources soon. 

[smacdonald2008]

Here is the best practices from the docs. 

https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-2/develop/the-basics/dev-guidelines-bestpractices.html

You question about allowing authors to add raw HTML. That is not a best practice as AEM authors typically drag and drop components from the side rail into the page and then set the component properties on a page, Authors should never have to work with raw HTML.

That would be more of a DEV task when creating components. 

Hope this helps. 

[paulmi319]

Appreciate the response. My authors need to publish a large variety of assets including tweet quotes, animations, carousels, YouTube embeds, galleries, scrollers etc,. It seems rather monotonous to create a new component for every new content type our creative agency comes up with. What alternatives do I have as opposed to just giving the author a code snippet to copy and paste? 

[smacdonald2008]

See this article - notice how its recommended that you create AEM components from the HTML. 

Check out the section titled: Convert static HTML includes into AEM components

This reflects best practice: 

https://helpx.adobe.com/experience-manager/using/first_aem63_website.html

Instead of static HTML - its much better to create components. 

If the component needs input values, then use a component dialog to input values.

But having authors inject RAW HTML is not best practice.  

[Jörg_Hoh]

paulmi319 wrote...

Appreciate the response. My authors need to publish a large variety of assets including tweet quotes, animations, carousels, YouTube embeds, galleries, scrollers etc,. It seems rather monotonous to create a new component for every new content type our creative agency comes up with. What alternatives do I have as opposed to just giving the author a code snippet to copy and paste? 

Authors are not supposed to put raw HTML into the page. If that would be the case I would not use AEM but another solution. The whole idea behind AEM is that authors should never be bothered with HTML, Markup and stuff like that. But that they should focus on the content.

My personal opinion: if your creative agency is only creative in terms of the page designs, layouts and markups, you should switch to a different agency. Your content should excel, not your components. Many very good sites do not need lots of fancy components, but rather have good content authors!

[jessielouthan · Accepted solution]

A couple of points from a long-time author:

1) I'm aligned with what Scott and Jorg said about using components versus adding HTML (which defeats the purpose of using a CMS). Using the components will allow your authors to be able to author content much faster.

2) In regards to creating components, I would sit down with your Functional team to assess how many components that you will need, and whether or not you can consolidate a lot of the functions that you need into a couple. I'm in the camp of using/having as few components as possible. The main reason is that only using a few will expedite the authoring process.