Creating the content architecture with AEM

In the last post I tried to describe the difference between the information architecture and content architecture; and from an architectural point of the view the content architecture is quite important, because based on that your application design will emerge. But how can you get to a stable and well-thought content structure?

Well, there’s no bullet-proof approach for it. When you design the content architecture for an AEM-based application it’s best to have some experience with the hierarchical approach offered by the repository approach. I will try to outline a process which might help you to get you there.
It’s not a definite guideline and I will never guarantee that it will work for you, as it is just based on my experience with the projects I did. But I hope that it will give some input and can act as a kind of checklist for you. My colleague Alex Klimetschek did a presentation at the adaptTo() conference 2012 about it.

The tree

But before we start, I want to remind you of the fact, that everything you do has to fit into the JCR tree. This tree is typically a big help, because we often think in trees (think of decision trees, divide-and-conquer algorithms, etc), also the URL is organized in a tree-ish way. Many people in IT are familiar with the hierarchical way filesystems are organized, so it’s both an comfortable and easy-to-explain approach.

Of course there are cases, where it makes things hard to model; but you are hit that problem, you should try to choose a different approach. Building any n:m relation in the AEM content tree is counter-intuitive, hard to implement and typically not really performant.

Start with the navigation

Coming from the information architecture you typically have some idea, how the navigation in the site should look like. In the typical AEM-based site, the navigation is based on the content tree; that means that traversing the first 2-3 levels of your site tree will create the navigation (tree). If you map it the other way around, you can get from the navigation to the site tree as well.

This definition definitivly has impact on your site, as now the navigation is tied to your content structure; changing one without the other is hard. So make your decision carefully.

Consider content-reuse

As the next step consider the parts of the website, which have to be identical, e.g. header and footer. You should organize your content in a way, that these central parts are maintained once for the whole site. And that any change on them can be inherited down the content tree. When you choose this approach, it’s also very easy to implement a feature, which allows you to change that content at every level, and inherit the changed content down the tree, effectively breaking the inheritance at this point.

If you are this level, also consider the fact of dispatcher invalidation. Whenever you change such a “centralized” content, it should be easily possible to purge the dispatcher cache; in the best case the activation of the changed content will trigger the invalidation of all affected pages (not more!), assuming that you have your /statefilelevel parameter set correctly.

Consider access control

As third step let’s consider the already existing structure under the aspect of access control, which you will need on the authoring environment.
On smaller sites this topic isn’t that important, because you have only a single content team, which maintains all the page. But especially in larger organizations you have multiple teams, and each team is responsible for dedicated parts of the site.

When you design your content structure, overlay the content structure with these authoring teams, and make sure, that you can avoid any situation, where a principal has write access to a page, but not to any of the child pages. While this is not always possible, try to follow this guidelines regarding access control:

• When looking from the root node in the tree to node on a lower level, always add more privileges, but do not remove them.
• Every author for that site should have read access to the whole site.

If you have a very complicated ACL setup (and you’ve already failed to make it simpler), consider to change your content structure at this point, and give the ACL setup a higher focus than for example the navigation.

My advice at this point: Try to make your ACL setup very easy; the more complex it gets the more time you will spend in debugging your group and permission setup to find out, what’s going on in a certain situation; also the harder it will be to explain it to your authors.

Multi-Site with MSM

As you went now through these 3 steps, you are through with it and already have some idea how your final content structure needs to look like. There is another layer of complexity if you need to maintain multiple sites using the multi-site-manager (MSM). The MSM allows you to inherit content and content structure to another site, which is typically located in a parallel sub-tree of the overall content tree. Choosing the MSM will keep your content structures consistent, which also means, that you need to plan and setup your content master (in MSM terms it is called the blueprint) in a way, that the resulting structure is well-suited for all copies of it (in MSM: live copies).

And on top of the MSM you can add more specifics, features and requirements, which also influence the content structure of your site. But let’s finish here for the moment.

When you are done with all these exercises, you already have a solid basis and considered a lot of relevant aspects. Nevertheless you should still ask others for a second opinion. Scrutiny pays really off here, because you are likely to live with this structure for a while.