Acme Corp is a shoe store franchise. It uses multiple channels to advertise its products to the customers. It has a website with the product catalog, a mobile app and in-store digital signage screens. There are obvious variations in the layout and content between these channels, but the company does want to re-use the product catalog pages across all the channels so they don't have to re-create the content each time. In essence, the marketing team designs the product pages for the website, and then re-uses the pages with slight modifications in the mobile app (different layout) and on the digital signage screens (no navigation menus and no customer interaction).
This how-to projects walks you through how to achieve these content variations using the concept of experience fragments and 2 different approaches based on live copies and building blocks.
The project presents 2 different approaches of using experience fragments with various variations for the different communication channels. The 1st approach uses live copies for the various variations, making it easy to replicate changes in the master fragment (i.e. the website) to the other variations such as the digital signage screens. The 2nd approach is based on building blocks which define a static experience to which content is added specifically for each variation.
- Navigate to the Live Copy - Experience Fragment
- Modify the Content reuse — Web
- Select the Content reuse — Screens variation
- Open the References side rail, select the blueprint and click Rollout to apply the changes to the Screens variation
- Modify the Content reuse — Screens variation
- Navigate to the Building Blocks - Experience Fragment
- Modify the Content reuse — Web building block variation
- Select the Content reuse — Screens variation
- Modify the Content reuse — Screens variation
| AEM version | Compatibility | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| 6.3 | ❗ | Building blocks do not exist is 6.4 and will fail to display in the experience fragment variations. Also, 6.3 does not let you convert existing content in Sites to new experience fragments, so you have to manually create the fragments and then assign each variation to the proper communication channel. |
| 6.4 | ✅ |
The solution uses:
- Experience Fragments
- Live Copies engine
- Building Blocks
- a standard Sequence Channel
This module requires HowTo project and is part of the install process. Follow instructions here.
If you still want to install the module individually, you can run:
mvn clean install content-package:install
Start by familiarizing yourself with Experience Fragments for Sites and make sure to create a fragment to be re-used.
- Create a screens project
- Create a new sequence channel for the master sequence
- Edit the channel and add assets or components as needed.
- Go to the Experience Fragments Console
- Select the Live Copy - Experience Fragment
- Open the Create dropdown on the top right and click Variation as live-copy
- Select the Content reuse — Web variation as source, then give a name and title to the new Screens variation and validate
- Edit the Content reuse — Screens variation and modify it as needed
- Go back to your sequence channel and edit it
- Add a new Experience Fragment component and point it to the Content reuse — Screens variation to use.
- Modify the Content reuse — Web variation to add new changes
- Select the Content reuse — Screens variation
- Open the References side rail, select the blueprint and click Rollout to apply the changes to the Screens variation