Using Content Driven Development

Content-driven development enforces a content-first process where you design and test content models before coding blocks. Start by discovering existing content or modeling new structures, then create test content in your CMS or locally to validate author workflows and ensure blocks align with how content creators actually work.

Test content serves dual purposes: it validates your block implementation against real content structures and acts as PR documentation and author reference. Building test content upfront ensures your block handles the content model correctly and catches design issues before deployment.

Start with content discovery and modeling to understand author needs, create representative test content, then begin coding only after test content is ready. This orchestrated approach integrates with related skills like content-modeling and testing-blocks to ensure accessible, author-friendly implementations.

No, content-driven development applies to all AEM Edge Delivery tasks except trivial CSS-only tweaks. It covers new blocks, block modifications, decoration changes, bug fixes requiring validation, and any code affecting how authors create or structure content.

The skill orchestrates alignment across related development tasks by mandating test content discovery and modeling before coding, then integrating with testing-blocks and block-collection-and-party skills to ensure comprehensive validation against real content, linting, and PR readiness with accessible test URLs.