XM Cloud Page Builder Achieves Feature Parity with Experience Editor

As far as I'm concerned, Sitecore has brought the Pages page builder up to feature parity with Experience Editor as part of a feature release included in their "seasonal release": editing of page and content item fields directly within the page builder interface (source).

Previously, content authors using Pages faced limitations editing certain fields. For example, fields on data source content items (component content) or page metadata which was not necessarily displayed on the page itself required switching to the Content Editor (A.K.A. Content Explorer in XMC). This broke the WYSIWYG flow. Additionally, while fields types such as Droplist, DropLink, MultiList, and TreeList could be placed on a page, they could not not be edited in the Pages UI. The update allows authors do all of this within the page builder via new content panes. The following fields are now supported:

• File
• Droplist
• Droplink
• Droptree
• Taglist
• Checklist
• Multilist
• Treelist
• Multiroot treelist
• Checkbox

This feature in particular has been highly requested ever since the release of Pages about one year ago. One of the biggest concerns with Pages was the lack of editing support for complex field types. Experience Editor supported this via a Field Editor or Edit Frame popup (which was essentially an embedded Content Editor UI). Now these additional field types can be edited in Pages. This dramatically closes the gap with Experience Editor and in fact makes Pages even more capable than Experience Editor, given that no additional setup is required to be able to edit these fields, unlike Experience Editor.

Pages has reached near-complete feature parity with Experience Editor, which is estimated to be sunset in Q2 this year. Along with real time autosave and instant previewing along with other features, Pages is really starting to show its value over Experience Editor.

In bullet format, the outcomes and implications are:

• Pages has reached near-complete feature parity with Experience Editor.
• Addresses customization limits associated with XMC / Pages.
• Reduces context switching.
• Unifies the authoring experience.
• Demonstrates Sitecore's responsiveness to user feedback.
• Lowers training barriers.
• Page metadata and content in one place.
• Fewer reasons to delay moving to XMC and yet another reason why XM Cloud is becoming not just an option, but the preferred way to run Sitecore, offering a future proof environment for content management that continuously improves.

Sitecore has shown commitment to listening to their customers and the community. It is clear that they are working hard, building momentum, and developing out in the open. The value of XMC is much increased with this feature.

Stay on top,

-MG