AEM Content Fragments: All You Need to Know

Content is one of the most crucial elements of a website.

It is what enables you to engage and retain prospects, rank high on search engines, and persuade visitors to become customers.

Authoring content has never been an easy job, though.

Given the rise of omnichannel, the necessity of managing content for multiple touchpoints has complicated the process.

Maintaining and re-using bits and pieces of content is usually quite complex. Copied text may cling to its original style, creating variations of the same content.

These variations are often difficult to track, and authors end up creating redundant website content. Content fragments in AEM are a game-changer.

By facilitating reuse of the same content across channels, they help amplify your content to target audiences.

So, what are AEM content fragments, and how do they enable businesses to effectively manage website content?

Let’s find out.

What Are Content Fragments in AEM?

Content fragments in AEM enable you to create, design, and publish page-independent content.

They are channel-agnostic, which means you can prepare content for various touchpoints.

The content is not tied to the layout, making text editing easier and more organized. AEM content fragments are based on Content Fragment Models^[i] and contain structured content.

They can be delivered in JSON, which enables the bulk delivery of specific elements of a fragment using AEM core components.

What Makes AEM Content Fragments Versatile?

Following the increase in omnichannel content consumption, it’s now crucial for businesses to optimize content for different channels.

AEM content fragments enable you to build a channel-agnostic content pool with which you can create content variations for a specific channel.

In addition to this, they help you deliver content to channels other than traditional AEM web pages.

Using structured content and JSON export capabilities, AEM content fragments deliver content to Single Page Applications (SPAs), Native Mobile Applications, as well as a variety of external AEM channels.

This enables businesses that don’t use an AEM website to leverage AEM content services for omnichannel content delivery.

What Are the Types and Features of AEM Content Fragments?

AEM content fragments are mainly of two types-

• Simple Fragments – Based on Simple Fragment templates with no predefined structure, they are out-of-the-box with no customization

• Structured Fragments – Based on Content Fragment Models that pre-define a structure for the resulting fragment, it is easier for authors to input content and customize it

To create an AEM content fragment, you’ll need to first create a Content Fragment Model that’ll enable you to define its structure.

This content fragment can then be used in AEM pages using AEM components or as raw JSON in third-party applications.

Content fragments in AEM include various features that facilitate the creation of multiple versions of content. Some of these are:

• Language workflow support for translation and localization
• Synchronization of content elements across variations
• Importing content and annotating multi-line text elements
• Updating content to multiple pages from a single location
• Visual comparison of different content fragment versions
• Intelligent summarization of multi-line text elements

What Are the Benefits of AEM Content Fragments?

AEM content fragments are pure content with structured data that offer businesses a bunch of benefits for content authoring, maintenance, and distribution. Some of these are:

Headless Delivery: Using content fragments with AEM GraphQL APIs enables you to deliver structured content headlessly to applications. You can customize a single API query to retrieve and deliver the content you want to render within the headless CMS scenario

Speedy Development & Outcomes: AEM content fragments give you the flexibility to update content pages from one place. You can also release content variations across touchpoints in a fraction of the time taken by IT teams to implement these updates

Hassle-Free Content Management: Since AEM content fragments are modular and page-independent, maintaining and updating content is simple and straightforward. You can also create nested content to reflect the complexity of your data.

The Final Note

By creating content fragments in AEM and using them on multiple pages, you no longer have to create content more than once.

What’s more, you can wrap the content in a context-specific experience for optimal delivery, leading to higher engagement and business growth.

Interested in Learning About AEM Assets and Website Content Management? Contact Us!

References-

[i] Content Fragment Models