Reusing Content in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM/CQ5) for Better Customer Engagement

Arguably one of the most frustrating parts of any job is having to redo something. Whether it’s something as simple as moving boxes back to their original location or something as complex as re-doing your entire markup and CSS because you found out you need to support a legacy version of IE. Unfortunately, this happens in all lines of work, regardless of the industry. However, the important thing is limiting the amount of times you have to redo work.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) offers multiple features that allow authors to reuse or inherit content across multiple pages. In this post, we will cover some of the features authors can utilize to reuse content.

One of the very useful features that AEM comes with out of the box, is the parsys, paragraph system, and iparsys, inherited paragraph system. A parsys is one of the most used and core pieces of AEM. In a nutshell, it’s a compound component that allows authors to add various functionality to a page. An author can choose from various component groups and drag an individual component into a parsys and have it appear on the page.

The iparsys is very similar to the parsys component with the added feature that you can inherit content from the parent page. For example, let’s say we have a footer parsys in which we author multiple links that point to various locations on our site. If we author that footer on a parent page all the sub pages that also have the iparsys with the same name will inherit the created content on the parent page. This is ideal for situations in which you’re reusing the same content multiple times, such as the header, footer, and possibly the sidebar of a site.

Within the iparsys there are also features in which you can cancel or disable inheritance. Canceling inheritance stops child pages from inheriting content from the parent page. Disable inheritance keeps the iparsys from inheriting content altogether. Disable inheritance is useful in instances when you want a specific child page to not inherit the parent page content but you want the other child pages to inherit the content.

Regardless of if you’re building a small marketing site or a large enterprise-level site, reusing content is extremely important and can save your company time and money. Inheriting content across multiple pages can greatly reduce the workload of authors; allowing authors to focus on new, fresh content. This also reduces the chance for human error as the exact same content is carried across multiple pages.

Inheriting and reusing content is just one of the many useful features within AEM. Not only does it save you time but it helps limit the amount of QA and mistakes on a project. To learn more about many of AEM’s other useful features feel free to get in touch with us.

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