Best Practice? Creating a node for the homepage (index) instead of using the parent node.

[Tyler_Maynard]

I am having a debate with the placement of homepage nodes and would like some insight.

Typical AEM convention is to use the parent node as a homepage. Example:

/content/mySite/en

You would simply run en through an HTML rendered and pull up en.html.

We have been talking about placing a node within their to act as the homepage.

/content/mySite/en/index.html

This follows a more traditional model, but isn't used in AEM from what I can tell. Can anyone break down the pros and cons of going with this format? So far we are just thinking it may be easier for content authors, but I feel there will be more configuration on the dispatcher/web server so that www.mySite.com pulls up that content node by default.

Thoughts?

[Lokesh_Shivalingaiah]

You can use either way but question would be on creating an extra node for index.html alone. Also,, we might have to hide this from navigation aswell.

If you are looking more from a URL perspective of having index.html, you can anyways achieve by creating a vanity URL for en.html

Usual practice of creating website in AEM would be content/<website name>/<locale_region>/pages

[Abhinav_Sap]

If your homepage goes through frequent updates/activation's, then you would want to have a index.html/home.html as en.html will flush all the child's as well.

[Jörg_Hoh · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I would start from a URL perspective.

http://site.com/en.html
http://site.com/en/page1.html
http://site.com/en/page2.html
http://site.com/de/seite1.html

or

http://site.com/en.html
http://site.com/page1.html
http://site.com/page2.html
http://site.de/de.html
 

It depends very much on your specific usecase. If you have a multi-language page, you might want to act the language node as homepage. Or you already use multiple domains (language domains). Basically you can use both approaches.