With the arrival of Greg Dunlap's recent book on 'Designing Content Authoring Experiences', we are seeing a renewed interest in actually improving the experience for those authors, editors, marketers and others working with content.
As you know, the World Wide Web is based on a markup language called HTML, but perhaps you didn't know that in the early days of the Web, browsers were actually not read-only. If you had permissions, you could edit directly in the browser. That got lost and many years later, you have to log into a CMS, navigate to the content item, make your changes, click publish and wait.
In this members' call, we'll be joined by Web pioneer Steven Pemberton, who will talk about the very early days of web content authoring
Read moreContent teams know the frustration intimately. Monday morning starts with updating product descriptions in Shopify, switches to publishing blog posts in WordPress, then moves to campaign pages in Adobe Experience Manager. Each platform demands different skills, separate logins, and disconnected workflows. By lunch, three hours have disappeared into context switching rather than creating compelling content.
Managing content across disparate systems (e.g., AEM, e-commerce platforms, WordPress) creates operational nightmares. One global fashion retailer's content team spent excessive time navigating interfaces instead of content creation and strategy, requiring lengthy platform-specific training for new hires.
Over a year after the initial release, Adobe's Universal Editor has evolved into a unified editing layer for diverse platforms like WordPress, headless CMS, and traditional AEM, allowing teams to manage content through a single interface.
Solving the multi-platform content chaos is just one aspect. In this update, I’ll also share how the Universal Editor is removing the infamous learning curve tax associated with most CMS projects and how it is different when it comes enterprise control. I’ve also included some implementation considerations based on my experience and will wrap up with some recommendations for your implementation.
Read moreMost content management systems fill authors with dread starting at the login screen. That's because the needs of authors are rarely taken into consideration in CMS projects. When content systems offer a terrible authoring experience, people avoid using them. That means they can't communicate effectively with their customers. The result is stale, hard-to-read content that doesn't align with an organization's goals.
Designing Content Authoring Experiences is a new book just out written by content strategist Greg Dunlap. It's a book for the designers, strategists, and developers who build and maintain content management systems and as a community it’s a book we’ve been waiting for and also happy to support the Kickstarter campaign that made it happen.
With practical examples and best practices, the book will show you how to create content management systems that support authors, so that authors can better serve their audiences. the book argues that authors are users that a content management system needs to serve.
Read moreAdobe Experience Manager (AEM) is widely recognized as one of the market leaders in the enterprise CMS space and they don’t seem to be resting on their laurels.
Last year they released Edge Delivery Services, which had a big impact for AEM customers to help deliver websites at top performance and also Project Helix (earlier referred to as Franklin) enabling marketers and content teams to use their favorite tools, such as Word, Excel, Google Docs, and Google Sheets with GDrive or Sharepoint, to create stunning, responsive websites with perfect lighthouse scores.
Fast forward and Adobe unveiled the Universal Editor for AEM with Edge Delivery Services at Adobe Summit 2024 in late March. With Universal Editor, they’ve changed both how content creators and developers interact with the CMS.
As you might expect with a new component model there are migration challenges and the previous AEM components do not work with the Edge Delivery Services in the Universal Editor.
Adobe recommends using one authoring method; for most existing organisations shifting to the new world there are many changes to be made, this is similar to replatforming your website, if your organisation uses multi-sites then all sites must be migrated at once.
Let’s look closer at why the Universal Editor matters and the implications for customers.
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