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Experience Fragments were announced and released with Adobe Experience Manager 6.3. It’s another part of Adobe’s marketing phrase “Fluid Experiences”, an idea about making the process of content creation to front end users (customers) much easier and faster for marketing authors. Honestly, it’s just marketing. However, Experience Fragments are new, and there is a lot of misunderstanding about what they are and how you can work with them.
Even internally, here at Axis41, I have seen people confuse Content Fragments and Experience Fragments a lot. They are not the same. In reality, the only thing they seem to have in common is the name Fragments, and both reside in AEM. Adobe has a page that outlines what each one does: “Understanding Content Fragments and Experience Fragments in AEM”. I would recommend checking out the chart on that page. They even put in a helpful diagram that shows how they could be used together.
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What is an Experience Fragment?
From one of Adobe’s pages: “An Experience Fragment is a group of one or more components including content and layout.” Also, it “is a set of content that grouped forms an experience that should make sense on its own.” It’s a way of segmenting or batching together certain elements/components that together make up a piece of content. An extremely simple example would be a product title, product description, and product image. As with most things in AEM, the underlying idea is about content reuse. Author it in one place and use it in several different places or with several different variations of it.
On one of Adobe’s Helpx articles “Understanding AEM Experience Fragments” they have a video of Cedric Huesler showing what Experience Fragments are. I recommend taking the time (9mins) to watch it. Or you could check out the video on the “Using AEM Experience Fragments” page. It’s only 4 minutes. Show the second video to your content authors or non-technical people as I think it is a little easier to understand. Both are great though.
At the bottom of both of those Adobe’s pages it states, “with Experience Fragments marketers can:
- Reuse an experience across channels (both owned channels and 3rd party touch points)
- Create variations of an experience for specific use-cases
- Keep variations in sync with the use of Live-Copy
- Social Post experiences to Facebook and Pinterest out of the box”
This just outlines some of the ways that you can use Experience Fragments. In the future, we are going to try and share some specific ways you can work with them.
