Adobe Experience Manager Sites operational guide.
Explore the development skills required and learn how our CMS fits into your tech stack.
An operational guide to Adobe Experience Manager Sites.
Learn which capabilities you should look for in a content management system (CMS). Find out how Adobe’s headless CMS simplifies front-end development, accelerates continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), and provides marketers several methods to publish pages with flexible content authoring tools.
Choosing to implement a new content management system (CMS) isn’t a decision that enterprises take lightly. For IT teams in particular, there are a few key considerations.
- First, you need to ensure the technical foundation of the new CMS aligns with your company’s future business goals and technology roadmap. It should integrate seamlessly into your existing development processes, rather than adding complexity.
- Next, you must identify what skills and training your developers need to onboard and consider how quickly marketers can start using the platform. If significant onboarding effort is required for either team, it can slow your company’s time to market.
- Finally, make sure you have a clear understanding of scalability of the CMS as your company grows, as well as the support you’ll receive during both implementation and ongoing maintenance.
Standardized code and responsive web development.
When it comes to content, rapid delivery is just as important as rapid development. Since Experience Manager Sites is deployed entirely on GitHub, it will fit seamlessly into your continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. This tight integration minimizes manual handoffs and significantly accelerates the overall deployment cycle. The Adobe Experience Manager Code Sync GitHub app integrates your GitHub repository to test, publish, and deliver to the designated channels.
To deliver pages with the fastest possible load times, Experience Manager Sites also provides an out-of-the-box enterprise-level content delivery network (CDN). It’s fully managed, secure, and optimized for performance wherever your users are located. While this is ready and available to you, many large enterprises already have a CDN in place to store other content or to operate in specific regions, in which case that CDN can be easily integrated with Experience Manager Sites.
Empower marketers with flexible content authoring.
The demand for digital content creation and management is staggering, and customer expectations have put pressure on enterprises to create and deliver omnichannel digital experiences faster than ever. It can be difficult to create high-performance pages when marketers rely on IT to build, author, publish, and manage webpages as well as websites.
Edge Delivery Services in Experience Manager Sites empowers marketers with two methods of content authoring — document-based authoring and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing in the Universal Editor. It takes a separation of concerns approach to code, content, and design to significantly speed up development workflows. With these easy-to-use tools, marketers don’t need extensive training or IT support, so teams can work more efficiently and dedicate more time to their areas of expertise.
The block code that developers write is independent of the content authoring type, meaning it works interchangeably with either document-based authoring or the Universal Editor. This allows websites to use both types of authoring methods with a single codebase, including boilerplate and blocks. With this approach, your developers only need to create and maintain a single boilerplate and block library, and your marketers don’t need to be concerned that they have the correct blocks and styling across different pages.
Document-based authoring allows any marketer to create and edit webpages using familiar tools like Microsoft Word and Google Docs. Page elements, such as headings, lists, images, styling, and videos, can be transferred directly from the source document to your website. Marketers can work with the tools they already know, while front-end developers can independently and simultaneously create reusable blocks that translate the marketers’ content into web experiences.
The Universal Editor gives marketers the option to edit content in a live preview of the page. They can easily add, delete, and reorder blocks, as well as edit content in the editor. Unlike document-based authoring, the Universal Editor doesn’t require marketers to preview changes in a separate environment since they happen in real time on the page.
Both document-based authoring and the Universal Editor have fully extensible user interfaces that give marketers the flexibility to create, design, and deploy web experiences without heavy lifting from developers. With Adobe Experience Manager Sidekick and Universal Editor extension points, you can customize the authoring experience based on the needs of your marketers.
Flexibility: Harness the power of headless CMS and back-end systems.
While Adobe Experience Manager Sites provides developers with a boilerplate built with Vanilla JavaScript and CSS to simplify content creation and development, it still offers significant flexibility to meet your specific integration needs.
For example, large enterprises often hire highly skilled web developers and designers to build landing pages for major product launches. These pages usually aren’t based on existing site designs from the standard boilerplate or authors’ block library. Instead, designers and developers invest time in creating custom JavaScript, CSS, and unique content — much of which is discarded afterward, resulting in a wasteful expenditure of developer resources. With Experience Manager Sites, you can build bespoke front-end experiences while seamlessly harnessing the platform as a powerful back-end repository, reusing the same content across the new landing pages and your main site. This capability is key to supporting a modern headless CMS architecture.
With your own front end connected, content fragments become a valuable way to structure content through a schema or model. They let marketers enter elements like headers, descriptions, and calls to action (CTAs) through a preset native form, which is then pulled onto the page. This approach allows marketers to continue authoring content, while developers retain the flexibility to design pages with the technical functionality needed to power features such as animation and custom design work.
Translation management.
Scaling and managing content across multiple regions is time-consuming and often fails to be cost-effective. Integration issues between separate content management systems (CMS) and translation management systems (TMS) are common. Maintaining quality and consistency across several languages is challenging as enterprises expand globally. They need a straightforward approach to streamline translation and scale global content.
Experience Manager Sites includes powerful, built-in tools for managing multilingual content across global markets. This means you can connect to translation vendors via native integrations and automate workflows for both human and machine translation.
Support across developer communities.
Cloud CMS readiness for the enterprise.
When it comes to development, Adobe’s guiding principles are speed and performance, and Edge Delivery Services in Adobe Experience Manager Sites is no different. Because the platform can be easily integrated into your existing operations, you can quickly start creating and delivering webpages as well as full sites optimized for conversion and healthy core web vitals.
With only front-end developer skills required, developers can use the same JavaScript and CSS to build and maintain their pages, while marketers are empowered to author content in the tools they already use. From there, you can expand the platform as needed. Adobe Experience Manager Sites offers full UI extensibility to add features and digital properties as your business grows.
It’s time to uplevel your CMS. Explore how to get started with Adobe Experience Manager Sites, including guidelines and best practices specific to Edge Delivery Services.
Recommended for you
