How Content Fragments can save lives

Creating digital content for the world’s coolest airline often involves glossy photos, cheeky tone of voice and lots of red, but there are times when we need to be serious. The Fly with Virgin Atlantic section of our website is stuffed full of essential information to help customers at any stage in their journey, such as legal content that has to be 100% correct. This importance has led us to spend lots of time experimenting with new methods and processes to keep content consistent and up to date. A recent innovation sees us using Experience Fragments in Adobe Experience Manager.

So what is Adobe Experience Manager and what are Experience Fragments? 🤔

The Experience Fragment repository in AEM

Adobe Experience Manager is our Content Management System or to put it simply, AEM is our CMS. We use AEM to create all of the webpages on the Virgin Atlantic website. Adding text, image and video components to page templates that have been lovingly designed by our talented designers.

It makes web page creation a bit like building Lego; the bricks are the components and the finished model is the page.

Experience Fragments are a halfway house between pages and components. They don’t have the full structure of a page template but they can contain multiple components. They are stored in their own repository away from pages and can be dropped onto pages, exported to social media, sent to Adobe Target and shared as JSON by API.

That’s nuts — where we use Experience Fragments 🥜

Sometimes there are valid reasons to have the same content on multiple pages

This is where important information for customers and Experience Fragments come together; Our nut and allergen policy. This policy is relevant to customers browsing a number of different pages, traditionally this content would have either lived on one page or been copied and pasted onto each relevant page. Although in the short term this is ok it soon causes problems when the policy needs updating.

It relies on authors to remember all of the places where we show our nut policy. For something so important, this isn’t robust enough.

Now we store our nut and allergen policy in its own Experience Fragment then add this fragment to all relevant pages. The beauty of this comes when we only need to update the single fragment rather than every individual page. It saves time and could even save lives.

Into the future 🔮

JSON containing our nut and allergen policy

There will no doubt be many more policies and snippets of content that will benefit from being converted to Experience Fragments (AEM lets you do this in a few clicks!) and shown on more than one page but there are more exciting uses for Experience Fragments in the pipeline. Our colleagues at Virgin Holidays also need to refer to policies such as the nut and allergen policy when they are selling fabulous holidays including flights with Virgin Atlantic. Our plan is to use a Content Fragment to hold the nut policy within the Experience Fragment we already use, this Content Fragment can be called via an API and returns the content in JSON for display on the Virgin Holidays website.

We will author once and distribute the same policy across multiple sites and pages — magic!