Understand the three widget patterns

When designing widgets, your most important decision is how each widget sources its content. Xperience supports three distinct patterns, each with different trade-offs in terms of reusability and content governance.

Pattern A: Overwrite default content in widget properties

Mixed content widgets reference a content item from the Content hub and provide override properties that let editors customize specific fields without modifying the original content. This is the recommended pattern for most commerce widgets because it gives marketers the flexibility to optimize their content and messaging, campaign variations, and audience segmentation while keeping the core product or pet data intact.

Example: A ProductCardWidget can reference a Premium Dog Food 25lb product from the Content hub. On a campaign page, the editor overrides the headline to Summer Special: Premium Dog Food and adds a 20% Off promotional badge - without changing the original product data. The following image shows the same scenario with a different product - a Car loan in the Kbank demo site.

Editors use the product widget to select a product to display. They can override the default values for product title, description, and image. They can also adjust which product data is displayed in the widget, such as product features.

Pattern B: Reference content in widgets

Referenced content widgets display content exactly as it’s stored in the Content hub, with no override capabilities. Use this pattern when data integrity is the priority, and you need consistent, canonical content display.

Example: An ImageWidget displays a product photograph exactly as stored, with the same aspect ratio, alt text, and caption everywhere it appears. Similarly, the Products widget on the Dancing Goat website displays only reusable product data, and editors have no way to override these default values, as you can see in the following picture.

Pattern C: Store content in widgets

Stored content widgets don’t reference Content hub data (except for images and similar assets). The data lives directly on the page within the widget configuration, which ties the content to a specific page URL and makes the content almost impossible to reuse in other channels. Use this pattern for truly one-off content that exists only on a specific page.

Example: A Rich Text Widget provides a unique introduction paragraph for a campaign landing page – content that won’t be reused anywhere else.

When to pick each pattern

For more about how Xperience handles widget data storage and the implications for content reuse, see the differences between structured content and Page Builder content.

Now that you understand the three patterns, let’s explore how to design each type, starting with the most flexible widgets, which allow editors to adapt the reusable content.