AEM Marketing team Vs Developers - Basic HTML Content Editor

Overview

In this post, we are going to discuss about the use case when marketing team wants to build new pages out of given AEM/CQ templates and components but want to change the theme of the page. In a way, they want to change look & feel of the page. And some changes expected in functionality as well.

Problem:

Let's assume there is a situation when business/marketing team wants to build new pages with new design and they find that it can't be done even though there are enough templates and components available.
So, they approach to the development team and put their request. Now, development team comes with estimation and breaks entire design pages into peaces because they want to build components for each design peaces. Marketing team feels it is too much time taking and can't wait for 2 to 4 weeks for development, deployment and UAT etc. So what should be done now?.

Solution:

As you understand above problem. This is very common problem in any AEM project. And there are multiple reasons for that.

• Development team has not consider the authoring experience. They have given a component with fancy functionality and it lacks basic authoring experience. Any small twist breaks the component or change the view. In general, We all developers cares what is being asked in terms of functionality. Authoring is always a low priority.
• Less involvement of marketing team while demo or in development phase. 

Having said and discussed above problems. Here are the solutions:

1.  Marketing team has to asked to the development team every time they want new design page. And developers would come up either new template or existing one. Also could end up creating new components. i would skip the complexity of going route.
2. Provide a simple HTML content editor and asked build to insert the pure html content through this component and render whatever design they want.

Second solution seems more easy for both parties. isn't?

"A simple HTML Content Editor component would give flexibility to the marketing team to build new pages they want. All they have to do is get html peace along with CSS & Javascript and insert through this component into the page".
I know many questions might have popup in your mind that why can't we build entire application like this. Or You might be thinking about pros & Cons of this solution.

Pros

• Easiest & Quickest route for the marketing team to deliver new content.
• No development effort so cost saving as well.
• Completely owned by marketing team. No dependencies except designer team.

Cons

• A html which will be used by marketing team must be self sufficient. it means all javaScript & css and assets owned by them. 
• If there is no developer interference then css & javascript must be inline within the html snippet. 
• All URL's especially DAM or third party must be absolute URL's. can't point to the domain where no assets are found.

Now the question is how this component should be?. Is it different AEM Rich text editor? why can't we use rich text editor?

To keep this post short, we have another post to describe how HTML Content editor component should be build to solve above problem.
Basic HTML Content Editor Vs RichTextEditor