Page Authoring

Why a developer should learn the author UI

It is tempting to skip this. Do not. Most of the design decisions you make — whether a field belongs in the dialog or the policy, whether a variant is a style or a component, whether a component needs a placeholder — are decisions about someone else's daily work. If you have never built a page in AEM, you will make those calls badly.

The Sites console

/sites.html/content/<site> is the content tree. Three view modes — column, card and list — and the list view is the one to know: it shows modification date, published status and workflow state at a glance. Selection mode enables bulk operations: move, copy, publish, delete.

The rail on the left gives you content tree navigation, timeline, and references. References is genuinely useful to a developer: it shows what links to a page, which is how you find out whether deleting something will break anything.

The page editor

The mode selector in the top-right switches what the editor does, and each mode maps onto something you now understand:

• Edit — the normal authoring mode. Drag components in, open dialogs.
• Layout — responsive column spans per breakpoint (day 20).
• Developer — shows the component tree and resource types for the page. Genuinely handy for confirming what is actually rendering.
• Design — legacy static-template design mode; editable templates use policies instead.
• Preview — hides the authoring chrome so you see roughly what a visitor sees.
• Annotate — leave comments on the page for other authors.

Versioning

AEM creates a version whenever a page is published, and authors can create one manually at any time. From the timeline rail you can:

• See the version history with timestamps and labels.
• Compare two versions — a visual diff highlighting what changed.
• Restore a version, which replaces the current content.

Under the hood this is JCR versioning: the mix:versionable mixin on the page's jcr:content, with version storage in the repository. Restoring is a content operation on author — it does not publish, so the live site is unchanged until someone republishes.

Timewarp

Timewarp renders a page as it was at a chosen moment, reconstructing from version history. It answers "what did this page look like last Tuesday?" — which comes up constantly in incident reviews and in arguments about when something changed.

It is limited by what versions exist: with no version from that date, Timewarp shows the nearest earlier one. It is a viewer, not an audit log.

Page properties worth knowing

• Basic — title, tags, description; onTime and offTime for scheduled activation and deactivation.
• Advanced — the canonical URL, redirect target, template reference, language.
• Thumbnail — used in the console and by components like Teaser and List.
• Social Media — Open Graph sharing configuration.
• Cloud Services — per-page integration configuration.

onTime and offTime are worth flagging: they schedule publication and unpublication, and they are frequently the explanation for content that "disappeared on its own".