We did a podcast about the podcast about the Component Placeholders in which we talked about the usefulness of this feature. Here is a written breakdown of that podcast for this specific ACS AEM Commons feature.
What is it?
From the ACS GitHub page about Component Placeholders: “ACS AEM Commons adds some helper CSS classes for creating nice component placeholders for the Adobe Experience Manager Classic UI.” Unfortunately this is only for Classic UI. And while you might ask, why should we care about this given the Touch UI, keep in mind that originally there was only the Classic UI and there are still a lot of people out there on older releases of AEM that don’t use the Touch UI yet. This utility can bring a nice, polished feel to those older projects.
While they documented it as not available for Touch UI, we were able (through some experimentation) to get them to appear on some of the standard Touch UI components, so the limitation seems likely to be a matter of not having had anyone spend the cycles to provide the needed code.
How it works
This utility provides some additional CSS classes and default images to enable you to put a nice, visual indicator on Classic UI components. Components on the page that do not contain any content will have a visual placeholder indicating that a component has been placed in a certain spot.
Audience impact (authors, devs)
Devs – Developers will choose the placeholder icon for any particular component.
Authors – Authors will see a nice, visual placeholder to help them understand the kind of content they will be adding to a component dialog.
Example application
Anytime you want to provide some visual polish to your Classic UI Author environment, you can use Component Placeholders. If you use Enhanced Templates for your Adobe Experience Manager pages, then when the page is created you will see placeholders all over the page where components are, thus giving a visual queue to the authors that they can begin authoring and do not need to pull components from the sidekick.
Check out our other posts on specific ACS AEM Commons features by subscribing to AEMPodcast.com.