Edge Delivery Services: Getting started with document-based authoring

Document-based Authoring in combination with Edge Delivery Services is the latest innovation of AEM Sites. It comes with an all-new authoring and developer experience to build the fastest sites on the web.

Learn about Edge Delivery Services and how to build your experience with it. This talk will cover the core concepts and features of Edge Delivery Services, and how to get started with a new site quickly.

A crucial aspect of every project is the structure of the content documents. This presentation will also cover content modeling and organization for document-based authoring, best practices on how content can be structured using Word & Google Documents.

Henry Kuijpers

Does the public-facing website need any additional metadata elements / attributes to be able to make this work?

(see answer in talk video)
How are editing permissions set up? How are Preview URLs protected?

DJ

- Editing permissions: managed by the relevant document editing platform (SharePoint, GDocs, ...), not directly related to edge delivery services - By default preview URLs are not protected. Authentication using MSFT IDP can be set up.

Roy Teeuwen

Are there already reference cases where the document-authored content is used as experience fragment in AEMaaCS sites pages?

(see answer in talk video)

BartT

How does this integrate with authors wanting to edit documents in applications instead of browser edit?

Markus Haack

Applications? Like Desktop Word? This will work as well. Other applications are not supported ootb. However as the Edge Delivery Services are decoupled from the CMS Source and authoring you can ingest content from any application using a custom ingestion as long as it can produce semantically formatted HTML and JSON we support for ingestion.

Vugar Aghayev

Out of curiosity, why the project name has been changed several times in a short time : Helix, Franklin and now Edge Delivery Services

(see answer in talk video)

Barry

Can you have parts of the domain be served by Edge Delivery Services and parts by AEMaaCS CDN for example? www.example.com/products -> EDS www.example.com/ -> AEMaaCS/Fastly www.example.com/articles -> AEMaaCS/Fastly

DJ

Yes, this is a function of mapping paths to different origins on the production CDN.

Barry

Are you stating that it's possible if EDS is your main CDN but if you have your domains managed in AEMaaCS you can not manage these mappings, right?

DJ

AEMaaCS CDN is configurable, but currently not by the customer directly. Just talk to us and we make it happen.

Barry

good to know, thanks 🙌

Juan Sanchez

How to keep good quality on images if those are being added to a word file and can loose quality? Or how to handle renditions depending on when the page is being render.?

DJ

Images are managed by AEM and there's no correlation to word directly. Recommendation is to upload high-rez and the resolution-appropriate selection of quality occurs on the client. https://www.hlx.live/developer/block-collection/images

Anni

Aren't there massiv amounts of bugs happening because of things like wrong formatting in the files or authors not strictly following the formats and the file reader than failing to recognize what to do with the input?

(see answer in talk video)

Behzad

How do you deal with multi-regional websites where the Author wants to make the change once and roll it out to multiple language copies?

(see answer in talk video)

Lukas Beck

Is it possible to define/restrict the content structure? If so, how? E.g. every page needs a hero image

Markus Haack

Partially yes, you can create pages from templates. Word also allows you to restrict editing on certain content areas and lock others.

Robin

Can the author also create different experiences for different types of devices / screen sizes? For example mobile optimised content?

Markus Haack

The author should mostly not care about that and this should be handled as part of the rendering and styling. However there are use cases an authoring cares, for example different hero video/images, landscape video on desktop vs. portrait format video on mobile. This is possible.

Henry Kuijpers

Is nesting blocks disabled/impossible because of technical reasons? Or to reduce complexity for authors? I can imagine it could still be useful.

Markus Haack

It is both - focus on ease of use for authors, but we are opinionated on a flat and clean HTML structure. Deeply nested div structures can be a performance killer.

EA

Is it also converting it to html5 elements like article, section and nav

Markus Haack

Not ootb as we opted for a more generic structure. However you are free to decorate this in you project.

Is it possible to have dynamic sections or personalized content?
(see answer in talk video)

Henry Kuijpers

When you load fonts later, doesn't the page still jump? Often, the fonts have different measurements, causing elements to become larger/smaller

Karl Pauls

You can mitigate that using properly sized fallback fonts

Robin

The header is located above the fold, so why is it loaded in the lazy phase instead of the eager phase?

Markus Haack

Can be both, often site have large mega menus which are not needed for the initial paint.

Krystian

This is the MS Front Page 2.0 or 2023. Isn't it?

Markus Haack

Does MS Front Page has Edge rendering and a CDN ? 😀

nusername

Does it support LaTeX?

Markus Haack

No

Can you tweak what's loaded when?

Markus Haack

Yes you have full control of the block loading and can modify the loading logic as needed. For example when using a tab block you maybe want to make sure the visible tab and blocks are loaded first before the rest, even with deep link to a dedicated page tab.