Creating and Organizing Pages

This section describes how to create and manage pages with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) so that you can then create content on those pages.

As an author you will need to organize your website within AEM. This involves creating and naming your content pages so that:

• you can easily find them on the author environment
  
• visitors to your site can easily browse them on the publish environment

You can also use folders to help organize your content.

The structure of a website can be thought of as a tree structure that holds your content pages. The names of these content pages are used to form the URLs, whereas the title is shown when the page content is viewed.

The following shows an extract from the Geometrixx site; where, for example, the Triangle page will be accessed:

• Author environment
  http://localhost:4502/cf#/content/geometrixx/en/products/triangle.html
• Publish environment
  http://localhost:4503/content/geometrixx/en/products/triangle.html
  Depending on the configuration of your instance, use of /content might be optional on the publish environment.
   

This structure can be viewed from the Websites console, which you can use to navigate through the tree structure.

When creating a new page there are two keys fields:

• Title:
  • This is displayed to the user in the console and shown at the top of the page content when editing.
    
  • This field is mandatory.
• Name:
  • This is used to generate the URI.
    
  • User input for this field is optional. If not specified, the name is derived from the title.

When creating a new page, AEM will validate the page name according to the conventions imposesd by AEM and JCR.

Implementation and the list of characters allowed differs slightly according to UI (it is more extensive for the touch-optimized UI), but the minimum allowed is:

• 'a' through to 'z'
• 'A' through to 'Z'
• '0' through to '9'
• _ (underscore)
• - (hyphen/minus)

Use just these characters if you want to be sure of them being accepted/used (if you need full details of all characters allowed, see the naming conventions).

If you supply only a page Title when creating a new page, AEM will derive the page Name from this string and validate the name according to the conventions imposed by AEM and JCR. In both UIs a Title field containing invalid characters will be accepted, but the name derived will have the invalid characters subsituted. For example:

If you supply a page Name when creating a new page, AEM will validate the name according to the conventions imposed by AEM and JCR.

In the:

• Touch-optimized UI you cannot submit invalid characters in the Name field. When AEM detects invalid characters the field will be highlighted and an explanatory message shown to indicate the characters that need removing/replacing.
• Classic UI you cannot enter invalid characters in the Name field.

In AEM, a template specifies a specialized type of page. A template will be used as the basis for any new page being created.

The template defines the structure of a page; including a thumbnail image and other properties. For example, you may have separate templates for product pages, sitemaps, and contact information. Templates are comprised of components.

AEM comes with several templates provided out-of-the-box. The templates proffered depend on the individual website and the information that needs to be supplied (when creating the new page) depends on the UI being used. The key fields are:

• Title
  The title displayed on the resulting web-page.
  
• Name
  Used when naming the page.
  
• Template
  A list of templates available for use when generating the new page.

Components are the elements provided by AEM so that you can add specific types of content. AEM comes with a range of out-of-the-box components that provide comprehensive functionality; these include:

• Text
• Image
• Slideshow
• Video
• many more

Once you have created and opened a page you can add content using the components, available from the sidekick.

Unless all pages have been created for you in advance, before you can start creating content, you must create a page:

You can open the page to be edited by one of several methods:

• From Websites console, you can double-click the page entry to open it for editing.
• From Websites console, you can right-click (context menu) the page item, then select Open from the menu.
  
• After you have opened a page, you can navigate to other pages within the site (to edit them) by clicking hyperlinks.

When copying, you can copy either:

• a single page
• a page together with all subpages

The procedure to move or rename a page is the same. With the same action you can:

• move a page to a new location
  
• rename a page at the same location
• move a page to a new location and rename it at the same time
  

AEM offers you the functionality to update internal links to the page being renamed or moved. This can be done on a page-by-page basis to provide full flexibility.

To move or rename a page:

You can lock/unlock a page from either a console or when editing an individual page. Information about whether a page is locked is also shown in both locations.