Learn about headless content and how to translate it in AEM learn-about

Learn headless concepts, how they map to AEM, and the theory of AEM translation.

Objective objective

This document helps you understand headless content delivery, how AEM supports headless, and how such content can be translated. After reading you should:

Full-Stack Content Delivery full-stack

Ever since the rise of easy-to-use, large-scale content management systems (CMSes), organizations have used them as a central location to manage messaging, branding, and communications. Using the CMS as a central point for administering experiences improved efficiency by eliminating the need to duplicate tasks in disparate systems.

In a full-stack CMS, the functionality for manipulating content is in the CMS. Features of the system make up different components of the CMS stack. The full-stack solution has many advantages.

So if new channel must be added or support for new types of experiences is required, one (or more) new components can be inserted into the stack and there is only one place to make changes.

However the complexity of the dependencies within the stack quickly becomes apparent as other items in the stack need to be adjusted to accommodate the changes.

The Head in Headless the-head

The head of any system is generally the output renderer of that system, typically in the form of a GUI or other graphical output.

When we talk about a headless CMS, the CMS manages the content and continues to deliver it to consumers. However, by only delivering the content in a standardized fashion, a headless CMS omits the final output rendering, leaving the presentation of the content to the consuming service.

The consuming services, be they AR experiences, a web shop, mobile experiences, progressive web apps (PWAs), and so on, take in content from the headless CMS and provide their own rendering. They take care of providing their own heads for your content.

Omitting the head simplifies the CMS by removing complexity. Doing this also shifts the responsibility of rendering the content to the services that actually need the content and are often better suited to such rendering.

Translating Headless Content in AEM translating-in-aem

In addition to offering robust tools to create, manage, and deliver traditional webpages in the full-stack fashion, AEM also offers the ability to author self-contained selections of content and serve them headlessly.

The power of AEM allows it to deliver content either headlessly, full-stack, or in both models at the same time. For the translation specialist, the same set of translation tools can be applied to both types of content, giving you a unified approach for translating your content.

Further in the journey you learn the details about how AEM translates content, but at a high level, the concept is simple:

What’s Next what-is-next

Thanks for getting started on your AEM headless translation journey! Now that you read this document you should:

Build on this knowledge and continue your AEM headless translation journey by next reviewing the document Get started with AEM headless translation where you will have an overview of how AEM manages headless content and get to know its translation tools.

Additional Resources additional-resources

While it is recommended that you move on to the next part of the headless translation journey by reviewing the document Get started with AEM headless translation, the following are some additional, optional resources that do a deeper dive on some concepts mentioned in this document, but they are not required to continue on the headless journey.