Content Hierarchy and Publishing

Hierarchy is architecture

The content tree is not just organisation — it determines URLs, permissions, MSM rollouts, translation boundaries, Dispatcher cache invalidation scope and search scoping. Getting it wrong is expensive to fix once thousands of pages and inbound links exist.

The conventional shape:

/content/wknd
  /us
    /en          <- language master or live copy
      /adventures
      /magazine
  /ca
    /en
    /fr

Principles that hold up:

• Region then language (or language then region) — consistently, one or the other. Mixing them breaks MSM and translation tooling.
• Keep it shallow. Deep trees make URLs unwieldy and navigation components fiddly. Three or four levels below the language root is usually plenty.
• Structure for permissions and rollout, not for the current navigation design. Navigation changes; the tree should not have to.
• Do not encode dates in paths unless the content really is archival. /magazine/2024/03/story ages badly.

Page operations

• Create — choose a template (constrained by cq:allowedTemplates), set title and name. The name becomes the URL segment.
• Move — offers to adjust referring links. Say yes: AEM rewrites internal links pointing at the page. Declining leaves broken links behind.
• Copy/Paste — duplicates a subtree. The copy is unpublished and has no version history.
• Delete — checks references first and warns. It also deactivates the page from publish.
• Rename — a move under the covers, with the same link-adjustment consideration.

Launches

A Launch is a working copy of a branch, prepared in parallel with the live site and promoted when ready. It is how you build a seasonal campaign or a site redesign without freezing normal publishing.

• Created from a source branch, optionally live-copy connected so ongoing changes to the source flow into the launch.
• Authors edit the launch in isolation. It lives under /content/launches.
• Promotion copies the launch content back over the source — the whole launch or selected pages.
• A launch can be given a date and promoted automatically.

Use a launch when you need a coherent future state of many pages. For a single page's future variation, onTime/offTime is far simpler.

Publication management

Beyond publishing individual pages (day 2), Manage Publication handles the real cases: publishing many pages at once, including references, scheduling for a future time, and routing through a workflow so someone approves before content goes live. The workflow route is the one to reach for in a governed environment.

Tags

Tags are a controlled vocabulary stored under /content/cq:tags, applied to pages via the cq:tags property. They power List and Search components, content filtering, and personalisation.

They only work if they are governed. An open-ended tag field produces "travel", "Travel" and "travelling" as three distinct tags within a month. Define the taxonomy deliberately, keep it shallow, and restrict who can create tags.