There’s a thought that a community project is an overwhelming effort from a time and engineering perspective.   With that in mind, Adobe has made a lot of simplifications.

Who uses the site:

Builders

• Community administrators
• Content and brand managers

Members

• Community Manager – not a company employee but is a trusted individual
• Community members – those who have joined the site and participate in the communities. (likes, voting, article creation, commenting
• Community User – a simple viewer of the content

Let’s Build a Community Site

Pain Point: I need something now and I need it to be simple. A business user should be able to do this.

They showed a live demo of the new Communities. It will be released on May 7th.

• Rebecca is a community administrator
  • She already has a couple communities up and running but needs a new one
• The new version has the revised UI which matches the themes from Marketing Cloud
• In administration page of the new UI
  • Each community has a set of building blocks called community functions
    • Activity Stream
    • Forum
    • Group
    • Page
    • Assignments
    • File Library
    • each is a normal AEM component but already wired together for community context
    • Blogs and calendars are coming soon
  • AEM provides a number of reference site templates you can use or choose to make your own
    • These templates have a structure tab that shows what functions are used in that template
    • You can add additional functions to any communities via a drag and drop interface
  • The concept of group is a place where community members can have sub-communities
    • Still uses the same building blocks
  • There is a new wizard to create a community site
    • Press a create site button
    • Fill in key information like Title, description, community name, and default template
    • Choose which design you want. This is the theme, color, etc.
      • based on twitter bootstrap so that’s where the default themes are derived
      • It’s fully responsive
      • Can add your own branding
      • Can configure basic things like a header image
    • Define options like
      • allow self registration
      • allow anonymous access
      • allow private messaging
      • allow social logins like Facebook or Twitter
      • other settings include
        • Tags for the community
        • Moderation
          • Is it moderated
          • flagging threshold
          • definition of community moderators (admins or members)
        • Group Management
          • Can create sub-groups, admins for those groups, etc.
        • Translation
          • Define default language
          • Check a box to allow machine translation into multiple languages
      • hit the finish button and you get a new site
• Created the site but then went to another existing community that had more content
• Reporting: Not in this release. It’s coming shortly after

Second pain point: I don’t want a rigid community. Make it easy to administer

Back to the demo but from a content manager standpoint

• Login gives a number of options like sites, moderation of site, users, etc.
• As a content manager, the manager has flexibility to put features on different pages and parts of pages.
• Uses the same layout tools from AEM Web Content Management
  • Add an image
  • add a community function
  • Preview in responsive scenarios
  • resizing of images
  • etc.
• Can also do targeting and personalization within the community

Now switch to the community manager (non-employees who help to manage the site)

This is a manage groups and moderate content scenario

• From the web site (community is a sub-site)
  • Community manager can login and see the community manager options
• The UI lets you do moderation for each piece of content in context (e.g. no admin screen, just embedded in the normal page)
  • Reply, Flag, Delete, Edit, Deny
  • Flag puts it in a workflow
• Does have access to the administration link
  • This includes bulk administration option
  • Find all flagged content
  • approve any content
  • deny or delete the content
  • Search can be for status of content (pending , approved, denied, closed)
• As a group manager, the user accesses and manages the group(s)
  • Can add a new group to the community site
  • Invite users
    • Use a type ahead to find users
  • Make the group public or private
  • Choose a group template
  • add an image
  • Post has a rich text editor embedded
    • can also attach images or files

Pain Point: Has to have a rich community experience. More than just a forum.

• Members can see private messages in their inbox (assuming it’s allowed)
• The activity stream lets you see what’s happening in all the community functions.
  • Has a following concept within the community
    • follow users and pages
  • Activity stream only shows activities for people / content you follow. Content includes threads
• Can update your personal profile

Fifth Persona: Community Users

Pain Point: find it online and make it available via multiple devices

• By default, this user is not logged in.
• The pages use a nice structure to allow it to be easily indexed
  • Google can thus find the public content
• has an internal search as well

So as you can see, each user type has a robust set of functionality available to them.

License:

This is a license product separate from AEM.