Sneak Peek into Day's CQ 5.4 CMS #dayignite

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) Oct 13, 2010

day ignite 2010 logo.jpg

Day Ignite kicked off today in Chicago. The theme of Day Software’s (news, site) Innovation Summit is "get mobile and get social." Equipping every attendee with an iPad helps to reach those goals. The theme was also reflected in Day CTO David Nuescheler’s presentation: What's New with CQ5: Sneak Peek into CQ 5.4.

At the beginning of the preso, Nuescheler admitted that counting to 10 is something he is not very good at, as he always goes over in his traditional top 10 faves and shows a lot more. This time was no exception.

Day Software included over 800 enhancements into CQ5.4, while still keeping the focus on the different stakeholders you normally see in an organization. CMO and business (with site owners, authors), and CIO and IT (with developers and systems).

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Day CQ5.4 welcome screen (note the new buttons)

With that in mind, here are Nuescheler’s top 10 faves in the upcoming (Q1 2011) CQ5.4.

10 - Sporty Spirit

CQ5.4 is faster, higher, stronger. Many pieces of enterprise software get fatter and more bloated with each release. Day is getting faster with improved start-up time. “I have a pet peeve with start-up times… CQ5.4 starts in 11 seconds,” said Nuescheler. Page rendering time has improved as well.

Nuescheler also said the company wants to make sure the upgrade path is easy. And then did an on-the-fly demo of upgrading www.day.com to 5.4.

The process went like this: drop a new .jar into CQ5.3, rename the new .jar, delete the old .jar. Restart and you’re on CQ5.4. Nothing (from what he clicked on ;) ) seemed to be broken, audience’s applause followed shortly.

As for stronger, Day did a tough day on CQ5.4 by load-testing the new version with the worst possible day in a life of a CQ5 instance. It was multiplied in batches of 10. The goal was to have the system completely usable while being hammered by this attack. And in the demo it was…

9 - Share Nothing

You may remember CQ5.3 clustering, where cluster nodes had a shared system between them. In real life, sometimes, it is hard to get shared infrastructure.

In CQ5.4, you can cluster two different boxes that share nothing. Changes made in one instance of the cluster are replicated to another one.

Day CQ 5.4 Share Nothing

If you can ping the other box, you can join the cluster.

8 – HTML5 Refresh

The starter site called Geometrixx that Day Software ships with its CQ Web CMS product has been redone in HTML5 with carousels and the whole nine yards.

This change led to changing some of the underpinnings as well. Nuescheler showed an example of a text component that had close to 50 lines of code. In CQ5.4, there was about 2 lines of code.

7 – Authoring HTML5

Nothing says HTML5 more than video, said Nuescheler. End-users don’t need to be bothered with video formats and transcoding, they want a nice and easy way of shooting a video and publishing it to the site. And this is exactly what Nuescheler by taking a quick video with his phone and uploading it into CQ5 (drag-and-drop, of course, and another round of applause from the audience).

CQ5.4 can manage video for iPhone, iPad, Android, Web, Flash, and with automatic transcoding.

Have images on your local drive? Drag-and-drop them straight into your browser. Easy.