Available Authoring options with AEM

[raf-winterpacht]

As we close out 2025 and reflect on what we've learned, I wanted to highlight the authoring options that are available in AEM, and have been rolling out over that past few years. I'm sure most users are familiar with the general options, but there are a few variations of experiences I wanted to cover. In no particular order:

AEM Sites authoring

This is what many customers working with on-premise, managed services, and AEM as a Cloud Service are probably more familiar. You have a WYSIWYG experience with the following forms of content:

• Pages
• Experience Fragments

Additionally you have Content Fragments, which come in a few flavors:

• Classic CF Editor:
  
• "New" CF Editor, which can be toggled on or off:
  

Universal Editor

Universal Editor also provides a WYSIWYG interface that supports both AEM content pages and other content sources, such as React components and Content Fragments. It also supports site content managed in Edge Delivery Services. The experiences are clean, smooth, and performant:

Document Authoring/Edge Delivery Services

When this was known as Project Franklin, editing content blocks in SharePoint (Word) and Google Docs was supported.

The original premise was to meet authors where they'd typically work and provide some basic preview and publish capabilities. There are some key differences, however. For example, WYSIWYG is not available, although a preview is readily available once the site experience is built. This has now expanded to more offerings including DA (fka Dark Alley). See https://da.live to get started. This is a great interface that does provide preview, collaboration, templates, libraries, and ongoing feature parity with AEM offerings above. I'm especially excited about where this is going, as it also gets a good amount of investment by Adobe engineers and the community:

Some others worth mentioning include Taxonomy Management and Metadata Forms (available in Cloud Services), Assets interfaces, and more that I have yet to explore.

There are certainly more interfaces rolling out, particularly ones integrated with Adobe's Agentic AI capabilities (See https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/experience-manager-cloud-service/content/ai-in-aem/overvi...), but that's way more than what I wanted to cover here, and I am eager to play around with those interfaces in the AEM Playground (aem.now). 

With so many options for interfaces come choices, and this will vary depending on your needs and what development teams need to support. But I'd rather have more options than not. 

Happy authoring!