Created by software company Day Software, CQ5 is a content management system centered around a powerful set of management features and various Web 2.0 technologies. This CMS is geared towards webmasters who want to distance themselves from the complexities of IT and simply have an enjoyable environment to work in. According to Kevin Cochrane, Day CMO, content management should no longer be just about functionality and ease of use, but fun and unleashing innovation from within. These are benefits that also extend to developers as CQ5 gives them their chance at new ActionScript and JavaScript API’s as well as an infrastructure based on many open-source technologies and standards. However, the inexperienced user may have a tough time finding themselves around.
Primary Features
When looking at the list of features, you can tell that Day put a lot of sweat into the most recent version of CQ5. While many CMS vendors are steering clear of Web 2.0, fearing it will soon be eclipsed by the Semantic Web 3.0, Day is one company that puts a huge emphasis on it. Some of its key features enable blog, forum and calendering functionality to help users incorporate that community like feel into their sites. The application also comes included with a number of pre-installed widgets for site enhancement. Web forms, comments, tags, slideshows, RSS feeds and wikis are just a few of the elements that can be used to encourage visitor interaction on you website.
Media Management Tools
CQ5 has a nicely integrated facility that makes it easy to maintain a variety of digital media assets. Some of the most notable features allow you to manage audio and video, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF file formats, watermarking and format transcoding. One of CQ5’s best qualities from a user aspect is image editing. The platform allows full image rendering and has some pretty nice editing features. Unlike many other content management tools, CQ5 offers a browser-based cropping functionality for getting the most out of your photos as you can easily crop, rotate, map and flush images.
Backup and Recovery
CQ5 truly excels in terms of its backup and recovery functionality. The newest version offers a hot backup utility that allows you to create backups of your entire file system. This includes content, configuration files, modules and web scripts. Restoring a complete CQ5 instance is a simple as extracting the backup from the zip file and restarting the system. This could be a great benefit that saves a company a lot time, money and valuable resources. All it takes a single click and all data is sent to Quickstart bundled file for disaster recovery purposes, allowing you to backup and restore your business environment in minutes.
Conclusion
While the new and improved GUI brings some user-friendliness to the product, CQ5 is a CMS best suited for advanced users. Developers can truly benefit from this tool as it packages together a powerful set of web technologies. It is the sophisticated and robust environment that takes away from its usability and makes this tool a little much for beginners.
2 Comments
CQ5 and PHP are not comparable develpoment environments, yet both can be used to create web sites. Can you tell me a rough idea of the effort needed to create a site with PHP versus CQ5? For example, create a web site with 10 pages, a few images and some simple functionality (e.g. a short survey quiz). How many hours would it take to create it in CQ5 and how many hours in PHP?
Well, this is great, however what about additional options we have here? Do you mind writing a further article regarding these too? Appreciate it!