What is auto-blocking?

Auto-blocking is a mechanism employed on the website that takes page data such as metadata or the default content on a page to create blocks without the need for a content creator to add a table to the SharePoint document.

You can read about auto-blocking on the AEM documentation. In our approach, as you'll read below, focuses on generating blocks from metadata and pulling in content fragments.

Note that some of the auto-blocking and other functionality within the site relies on specific directory names. If main directories (such as “ideas”) are changed, code changes would be needed in several places. Such as around `buildArticlePage`, `buildCareerPage`, the search script, and the formulas used in the sub-sheets of the query-index.

Article pages

The author bio for an article’s author or authors is automatically appended to the end of the article.

The article prefooter contains a related articles section, which will display the four most recent articles containing the same tags as the current article. Also included is a CTA. The content of this CTA can be edited in the `article-prefooter.docx` document found within the Partials folder.

Career listing pages

The aside, with the button link leading to the job application, and other listing details is automatically added to the page.

Additionally, the listing prefooter will also be appended to the page. The content of this prefooter can be edited in the `career-listing-prefooter.docx` document found within the Partials folder.

Ideas page

For displaying articles, the main Ideas page uses the “Ideas” block, along with the “Filter Group” block.

The order of tags can be modified here within the Filter Group block. Or tags can be added or removed.

The Ideas block can be modified to adjust the features that appear between articles. See the component documentation for a reference of the content used within the columns of each feature.

Ideas tag page

The tag page also uses a variation of the “Ideas” block. The first row first column sets the layout type as the designed “two-up”.

Most importantly, it uses a second column in the first row to provide the tag name of the articles that will be displayed.

Pages must be created for each tag, with the same name as the tag.