How to implement a custom AEM Communities page type

[thomask21133923]

Use Case

For a customer, we have to implement/configure a new AEM Communities site containing the blog feature. The customer has requirements to the layout and the content structure of the blog page as well as for things like "user profile", "login form", etc., that doesn't fit to the OOTB communities site structure.

We have configured a new communities site template at "Tools / Communities / Site Templates". A created communities site based on the named template always has the "sling:resourceType=social/console/components/basepage". All other sub-pages like "profile", "signin", "signup" have resource types pointing to "social/console/components/*".

Question

If we want to change the markup of the blog page, we would have to overlay all the "social/console/components/*" components, which will then apply to all other community sites. In AEM Sites projects we would normally create custom templates and page types. What is the best way to implement a custom community site without overlaying everything?

We are using AEM6.3 with aem-6.3.0-cfp.

[kautuk_sahni]

I have asked the internal AEM Communities expert to have a look at this one.

~kautuk

[Rahul_Bhardwaj · Accepted solution]

Hi,
You can try extension. It exactly addresses your question, i.e how to change a community component for your use case without affecting OOTB components. For understanding it a bit more, refer [0]. [1] gives you a sample extension. You clone the repo, build it and install it to see extended blog in action

[0] - Client-side Customization 

[1] - GitHub - Adobe-Marketing-Cloud/aem-scf-sample-components-extension: Sample package for AEM Social Co...