A Focus on Solving CMS Architecture & Operations Problems Elegantly with Modern Adobe Tooling
We recently held a double-header AEM Meetup in Cary, North Carolina, graciously hosted by JMP Statistical Discovery (an innovator in desktop statistical analytics software, and the world's first customer to go live on Adobe's Document Authoring (DA) for Edge Delivery Services). The meetup focused on solving enterprise CMS architecture & content-operations problems with modern Adobe tools for Edge Delivery Services & DA.
We've got the two presentations from the meetup for you here, as well as PDFs of the presentations and Edge Delivery/AEM Architecture diagrams discussed in the meetup:
Presenting at this meetup for the first time was Laurel Timko, Senior Software Engineer at JMP and creator of some EXTREMELY useful tools for large-scale content operations using Edge Delivery Services and DA.
Solving Big-Kid Problems with Modern AEM/Edge Delivery Architecture
The first talk at our meetup introduced a number of architecture patterns that you should be aware of when designing for a modern cloud-native AEM / Edge Delivery stack. We discussed:
- What Edge Delivery Services is, and the many ways to get content into Edge Delivery
- What Document Authoring for Edge Delivery is and how it fits into a modern stack
- What the Adobe Managed CDN is, and how its configurability changes how you think about your stack
- Discussed the various ways that permissions and configurations are configured & deployed in such a stack, including new changes on the Configuration Service for Edge Delivery.
Safe Bulk-Content Updates for Edge Delivery Services & DA
Laurel Timko then presented her outstanding tooling which was developed for JMP's Edge Delivery Services & DA implementation, which highlights the massive acceleration and democratization of content operations that is possible with Adobe's Document Authoring.
In the previous world of traditional JCR-backed AEM, mass content updates could only be done by scripts, and by developers with specialized knowledge. These scripts are high-risk and high-impact, and rollback is exceedingly difficult. There have been recent tooling breakthroughs, like Krystian Panek & Tomasz Sobczyk's amazing ACM tool discussed at last year's adaptTo(), but these still require specialized scripting knowledge and pose a significant risk. It's definitely not something you could turn over to an author to execute.
But in DA, mass search & replace is now possible, and that's what Laurel demonstrated. It enables:
- Bulk search & replace operations
- Context-aware, block-aware search & replace
- Rollback, dry-run and bulk preview/publish
And all these from the context of the DA editor, and without any scripting. Watch her presentation - it's a whole new world when you have tools like this available!
Thanks again to the amazing folks at JMP who graciously hosted this meetup!
Highlights of the Meetup
Deep-links here in the meetup to highlights from the presentations, as well as the Q&A afterward. We were lucky enough to have two amazing engineers from Adobe Engineering there as well, so some of these questions you may not see answered anywhere else!
- 1:45 AEM User Group Update & Upcoming Events
- 4:30 Audience Poll on EDS/DA Experience
- 6:00 Presentation 1: Building Blocks of Modern Edge Delivery / DA Sites - Tad Reeves
- 8:30 AEM Evolution and Composability
- 11:00 Edge Delivery Services (EDS) Overview
- 14:45 Document Authoring (DA) Introduction & Features
- 19:00 DA Customization, GitHub, CDN Pipelines
- 23:30 Edge Workers and Compute at the Edge
- 27:00 Authentication, SSO, Access Control Diagrams
- 30:00 Demo: EDS Site with AEM Backend & Sidekick
- 34:00 Q&A, EDS diagrams, AEM connectivity
- 38:22 Presentation 2: Safe Bulk-Content Updates in EDS/DA - Laurel Timko
- 38:00 Problem with Traditional Bulk Updates & Scripts
- 42:00 DA Search vs. Custom App Framework
- 47:00 Building the Advanced Search & Replace App
- 52:00 App Features: DOM Parsing, Filters, Previews, Exports
- 57:00 Replace Operations & Guardrails
- 1:02:00 Live Demo: Bulk Search, Replace, Versioning, Undo
- 1:08:00 Use Cases & Best Practices
- 1:12:00 Q&A, DA vs Traditional AEM, Resources & Quick Edit Demo to replace Universal Editor
Cary, NC AEM Meetup Photos
Photo credits: Andretti Brown, JMP
PDF Documentation Resources from the Event
Note: the EDS block above was the example demonstration block mentioned in the meetup with respect to AEM/EDS and Adobe CDN architecture. This block takes PDFs in an AEM as a Cloud Service DAM and displays them along with thumbnails generated by AEM for each PDF, along with the AEM Assets title, description and file size.
Edge Delivery / AEM Resources Mentioned in the Meetup
- Documentation - configuring the Adobe Managed CDN: Configuring Traffic at the CDN | Adobe Experience Manager
- Lab Session: putting together apps in Document Authoring (DA) for Edge Delivery: Extending Edge Delivery Services with micro-frontends
- Laurel's Advanced Search/Replace for DA, also featured on the Block Party for EDS
About the Author
Tad Reeves
Principal Architect at Arbory Digital
Tad is a 2x AEM Champion and leads Arbory Digital's AEM practice. Tad started working with CQ5 in 2010 with Day CQ 5.2 and has been in the CQ/AEM space ever since. He has extensive experience in website infrastructure dating back to 1996, and has worn nearly every hat in website delivery from solution architecture to product management.
When Tad isn’t working (and sometimes when he IS working), he enjoys mountain biking and exploring nature with his wife & 3 kids.
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