This past week I had the pleasure of attending the Day Ignite 2009 Customer Summit in Chicago (10/28 - 10/29) as a Day Partner, care of Earthbound Media Group (my employer and Day Partner).  Topics covered ranged from the upcoming Communiqué (CQ5) 5.3 preview (which I’ll comment on momentarily) to running CQ5 in a Cloud environment to the new Microsoft Sharepoint Connector - and much much more!  At the conclusion of the conference, we were treated to dinner and a show at the Chicago House of Blues - Foreigner! It was pretty neat!

The first thing that I want to share is the David Nuescheler’s Top 10 list of new features in CQ 5.3:

1. http://docs.day.com/
2. 500+ improvements to CQ 5.2
3. DAM improvements (never stops sounding funny…)
4. Calendar improvements
5. In-context editing
6. Segmentation/Personalization support
7. A/B Testing Component
8. Built in Performance Profilers
9. CRXDE (updated dev tool)
10. CRXDE-lite
11. Site Importer
12. Package Manager Share
13. Cloud Manager UI

So, you probably noticed that Nuescheler’s top 10 list was a top 13 list… Let me comment briefly on some of the ‘Top 10′ items and my take on them as a long time CQ developer…

docs.day.com

One thing that Day has never been ’strong’ at is documentation… Well, they obviously heard this complaint and decided to do something about it.  The docs.day.com site has a VERY comprehensive array of documentation on all aspects of CQ 5.3.  Another neat fact is that docs.day.com is authored and hosted in a CQ 5.3 Cloud environment.  Talk about drinking your own Cool-aid!  The doc site also includes a feedback so that items that are found to be missing, wrong, or incomplete can be addressed by Day Software…

500+ Improvements to CQ 5.2

Obviously a lot of these are bug fixes.  However, a lot of these are ALSO feature requests!  A few of the feature requests that Nuescheler mentioned will be shipping with CQ 5.3 are much missing enhancements to the Site Administrator - two of which include being able to see the Template Type and having a thumbnail of the template.

Items 3 - 7 in the list really fall under improvements and/or feature requests… So, let me touch on the briefly here…  The DAM panel now has thumbnails - which was sorely missing.  The Calendar has been severely updated, thanks in part to feature requests from University of Oklahoma (OU) and New York University (NYU).  The calendar now features aggregation as well as the ability to import into Outlook or iCalendar… In-Context Editing is a neat new feature. It allows you to click - and then click again - within a text component - and then start typing, right inline instead of in a dialog box.. The advantage is, that you get to see the content with it’s respective style.  I’m not sure how they pulled that off (scratching head).  Personalization/Segmentation now allows for target marketing and there is even an A/B Testing Component.

Built in Performance Profiler

This was a pretty neat feature… Over the past several years of CQ development, I’ve heard things like, “it runs faster on my development laptop than it does on the server” or “why is this page taking so long to load?”…  Day has added built in performance profilers… It’s pretty cool too, in the demo, Nuescheler showed that, when this feature is turned on, you can view the source code, find a hidden URL, paste it, and then view a graph of the profiler output for the given page… The output shows how long each component on the page took to load, as well as tons of other useful information about the system.  This is a fantastic new feature!

CRXDE and CRXDE Lite

They’ve taken the CQDE and expanded on it a bit more… CRXDE now supports SVN and is able to OSGi bundles and much more… It’s built on the Eclipse platform and looks like it might be a good replacement for standard Eclipse with SVN and FileVault…. Unless you like keeping your SVN client separate from your IDE (you know who you are!)…  The CRXDE Lite is a scaled down version that can be turned on/off which allows a quick, simple way to view source JSPs on a client’s (or perspective client’s) server.  I can see the CRXDE Lite being useful for initial installations and troubleshooting…

Site Importer

The live demo included importing the CNN home page and converting an entire section into a paragraph system… While, this couldn’t be used to copy an entire existing site and quickly convert the whole thing, as if by magic, into a CQ application, it does look to have several merits… The first thing that comes to mind is that with minimal training, a sales person could use this to demo, live, to a client… I think this will help sell a LOT of CQ licenses as it provides a quick, simple way to demo what is possible when converting a static site into a content driven/managed site.  Further playing around with this will be needed to see how useful it is for rapidly developing a REAL CQ implementation - I’m still skeptical about that…

Package Manger Package Share

This is a neat, new way to automate package sharing… If this feature is turned on, a system could receive live, updated hot fixes from Day… Similarly, a partner could have this set up with a client such that partner developed code packages and hotfixes could be auto-loaded to the client servers and deployed on the fly… As always, this is a feature that can be turned on OR off.

Cloud Manager UI

As the companies like Amazon have started pushing their EC2 Cloud Computing, Day has added a Cloud Manager UI to the new 5.3 release.  I’m a little unclear on how clustered nodes, author instances, publish instances, etc will work within the Cloud… But, as soon as 5.3 is released, I’m going to try an experiment with the Sys Admin/IT Specialist guy at work (will post on that experiment when it happens)…

Conclusion

That leads me to my conclusion… It looks like CQ 5.3 will be released in Q1 of 2010.  Until then, we’ll have to wait for these fantastic new features!