AEM Communities Overview aem-communities-overview

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Communities let you quickly create an on-premise community site that has improved performance, improved site management, and encourages the conversion of site visitors to valuable community members.

Communities Features communities-features

AEM Communities enables the development of a relationship with site visitors, which:

Communities features can be demonstrated using the AEM Demo Machine available publicly on GitHub.com or with the new We.Retail reference implementation.

Community Sites community-sites

A community site is an AEM Site created using a simple wizard that results in a website with many common features pre-wired into the site.

The site creation wizard:

To experience the ease of quickly creating a community site, visit Getting Started with AEM Communities.

Community Content Persistence community-content-persistence

To improve the performance and synchronization of community content, AEM Communities requires a common store specifically for user-generated content (UGC) shared between all AEM (author and publish) instances.

Community content is easily accessed through the storage resource provider (SRP), which provides a layer to separate access from the underlying topology and supports a common store for UGC.

To learn more about community content persistence and recommended deployments see:

Communities Consoles communities-consoles

In the author environment, the global navigation console provides access to the Communities console, which contains:

The global tools console provides access to the following Communities tools:

Community Site Templates community-site-templates

Community site creation is based on selection of a community site template to quickly set up a community site that is independent of any sample site.

A community site template, composed of community functions and community group templates, provides the structure for a community site. It includes login, user profiles, messaging, site menu, search, theming, and branding features.

See the Site Templates console.

Community Functions community-functions

The features expected of a community experience are well known. With AEM Communities, these features are available as building blocks, known as community functions.

Community functions are normal AEM pages includes components wired together into a feature that is easily incorporated into a community site template.

See the Community Functions console.

Community Groups and Group Templates community-groups-and-group-templates

The community groups feature is the ability for a subcommunity to be dynamically created within a community site by authorized users and community members from both the author and publish environments.

From the author environment, community groups (subcommunities) may be created within an existing community site or nested within an existing group, when the structure of the template contains the Groups function.

Creating a community group requires the selection of a community group template that provides the design of the community group pages. When a Groups function is added to a template structure, it is configured to either specify one group template or to provide a choice of templates at the time a new community group is created.

See also:

Community Components community-components

The community components from which a community site is built may be used to add Communities features to any AEM Site.

The community components guide is available for interactive exploration of the components.

Engagement Community engagement-community

An engagement community is a community site focused on engaging customers to inform, solicit feedback, and allow customers to interact as community members.

Features of an engagement community may include:

To experience the ease of quickly creating an engagement community, visit Getting Started with AEM Communities.

AEM Demo Machine aem-demo-machine

The AEM Demo Machine manages and runs demos for AEM Sites, Assets, Communities, Apps and Forms, which often require more setup than simply launching a QuickStart instance. The AEM Demo Machine sets up additional infrastructure such as MongoDB, Solr, MySQL, FFmpeg, and email servers.

The AEM Demo Machine includes:

The AEM Demo Machine was tested successfully with CQ 5.5, CQ 5.6.1, AEM 6.0, AEM 6.1, AEM 6.2, AEM 6.3, and AEM 6.4 on Windows, macOS, and Linux®.

The AEM Demo Machine requires a valid AEM license.

AEM Communities Documentation aem-communities-documentation