How AEM Pages Are Built — Components, Templates, and a Live Setup From Zero
Video 1 was about what AEM actually is. Today we get our hands dirty.
If you’ve ever wondered how an AEM page goes from nothing to a fully built, publish-ready page — this is that video. No slides. No theory-only walkthrough. We start with an empty laptop and end with a real page, live on a Publish server.
On-premise vs Cloud — pick one, not both
Before installing anything, there’s a fork in the road most beginners don’t know exists. AEM comes in two flavors: on-premise (AEM 6.5) and cloud (AEM as a Cloud Service, run locally through the Cloud SDK).
Which one you use isn’t really a personal preference. It’s whatever your company or client already has a contract for. A lot of working AEM developers end up touching both, depending on the project. For this video, we’re on the Cloud SDK — no license file needed, just a Java 21 runtime and a download from Adobe’s Software Distribution portal.
Setting up Author and Publish, for real
We check java -version, grab the SDK zip, unzip it, copy the jar into two folders, and rename each one — aem-author-p4502.jar and aem-publish-p4503.jar. That naming pattern isn’t cosmetic — it’s how AEM decides the run mode and port the moment you start it, and that decision is permanent once the server boots for the first time.
One double-click. One terminal command. Two servers, up and running.
A quick tour, then WKND
Once both servers are live, we walk through the Sites and Assets consoles — where pages live, and where your images and media live. Then we install Adobe’s WKND project, a ready-made demo site built for a fictional travel and adventure brand, straight from Adobe’s GitHub. It’s not the focus of the video — it’s the fastest way to get real templates and components on the screen without spending the whole episode building a site from scratch.
Worth knowing if you try this yourself: install WKND on both Author and Publish. Skip Publish, and your page will go live looking broken, because Publish needs its own copy of the same templates and components — that part doesn’t travel automatically just because you hit “Publish.”
Building a page with components
This is the part the title promises. We drag a Title component onto the page. An Image. A block of Text. A Button. Each one opens a small dialog, we fill it in, and it renders immediately. No code. No developer sitting in the loop.
That’s the whole pitch of AEM’s authoring model — developers build the components once, and then anyone can assemble pages from them, over and over.
Going live
Last step: connecting Author to Publish through a replication agent — think of it as the delivery route content travels on — testing the connection, and hitting Publish for real. The page that existed only in our sandbox is now something anyone could visit.
Full video is up now on YouTube.
It’s a longer one, since it covers the entire path from an empty laptop to a live page, but it’s all real AEM, no padding.
Next up (Video 3): building a real Maven multimodule project from scratch — the folder structure, the pom.xml, and the exact commands to deploy it to your local servers.
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