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Which Content Publishing System Is Right For You?

Shawn Wallace • July 30, 2019

Rich, engaging content is critical to building a successful digital experience. From helpful blog posts to vivid brand imagery and shoppable how-to videos, content comes in numerous shapes and sizes. But, no matter what format content comes in, content publishing needs to be easy, efficient, and intuitive.

Today, we will look at three vastly different content publishing systems: Zmags, Amplience, and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and highlight how these extremely valuable tools tackle a wide variety of publishing challenges and align with the needs of different business users.

Zmags

Pros:

  • Easy to learn
  • Intuitive and creative design through drag-and-drop UI.
  • Able to run natively within some commerce platforms for increased performance.

Cons:

  • Layouts are limited to adaptive designs, requiring designers to create pages for each separate viewport (desktop, tablet, mobile).

Zmags, the shoppable content company, empowers digital marketing and eCommerce professionals to create and publish engaging digital experiences in minutes, without writing a single line of code. Retailers can use drag-and-drop technology to easily create and quickly deliver the rich, shoppable experiences that drive engagement and conversions.

The drag-and-drop UI makes things super simple for non-technical business users to control their user and content experience. Ease of use is compounded by a content management system that gives users some simple organizational tools and a searchable image library.

This lightweight app is great for no-code designers who want restriction-free drag-drop design capabilities. If custom dynamic content control and hybrid-fluid responsive design is required, this might not be the ideal tool for those situations

Amplience

Pros:

  • Extremely fast to make template updates.
  • Full developer control enables highly customizable templates.

Cons:

  • There is a learning curve with this platform
  • Continued growth means that change comes quickly.

Amplience has been helping businesses create engaging online experiences since 2007. Amplience has constantly iterated technology to meet the increasing complexity of eCommerce content and the demands of the market. Now they have built a platform that incorporates the strengths of dynamic media, rich shoppable content, video and image optimization, user-generated content, and much more.

This added functionality also requires users to have a working knowledge of some code. We recommend that users know HTML, SASS, CSS, JSON, and Handlebars, as well as be comfortable working in the terminal and with Javascript to get the most out of the solution.

Amplience delivers a very powerful asset management system (The Content Hub) with features like user directory trees, search types, multiple view choices, and more. Assets can be assigned to users with publishing and workflow status. Image transparency can be toggled in the viewport along with a preview pane.

The platform has very robust capabilities and takes a bit longer to get comfortable with. It takes knowledge of each section of the platform to set up and publish a template through the UI; however, once familiar with the systems, updating templates is very fast.

Templates can be customized to an amazing degree, giving users plenty of control over their experience. Content updates are incredibly fast once users are familiar with the interface, making it a perfect solution for a merchant who is willing to spend some development hours tuning up their content and personalization strategies.

Adobe Experience Manager

Pros:

  • Once set up, this platform is very intuitive and easy to make template updates, even from a mobile device.
  • AEM is part of an entire suite of tools enabling users to control many aspects of a commerce solution. Analytics, Campaigns, Data Management, and more.

Cons:

  • A potentially steep learning curve
  • Expensive and timely to implement

Adobe Experience Manager helps you create, manage, and optimize digital customer experiences across every channel, including web, mobile apps, digital forms, and communities. It is an Enterprise-Level platform with all of the bells and whistles that we are accustomed to with any Adobe solution.

To effectively create in Adobe Experience Manager, user template creators must know HTML, SASS, CSS, HTL, Javascript, and JSP. For the page content creator, AEM has a very well-organized interface. Navigating through the application is fairly simple and users can quickly access assets while working within templates. While this app does require experienced developers implement and get running, it is incredibly user-friendly for non-technical business users as well.

With the recent acquisition of Magento, we are incredibly excited at the enhanced functionality coming to AEM. Wrapped in with the rest of Adobe’s offerings, AEM is by far the most powerful platform here, and, for those with the means to implement it, drives incredible value.


Shawn Wallace

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Shawn Wallace

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