Learn how to create packages with complete metadata and deploy them with the CQ Deploy Plugin

Before I get into the details of the problem I want to discuss, I am going to give you my personal thoughts and opinion on what I think the current state of some of the "original" CQ tracking features are.  I also want to give a plug for CQ and Adobe's approach to CQ.  I am appreciative of both.

Sometimes when trying to solve one problem, I discover the answer to another yet undiscovered problem.

I'm pretty sparing with bookmarks, however there are a few pages I use just about every day for my job developing for Adobe CQ5.  I have these daily use bookmarks in my bookmarks toolbar.  They are:

CQ Toggle

Actually, this is a bookmarklet, but it allows me to easily switch between editing more and a more 'real' preview mode.

So recently I was tasked to set up a "Shared-All" or "Shared-Everything" cluster in CQ5.5 (SP 2.1).  I found out fairly quickly that the resources online do not describe this process very well, so I figured I would share my experience with the web!

Do you have existing applications or are you building a new one? What you DON'T do about application security WILL harm you. Attend this information packed webinar and learn how to protect your applications from today’s vulnerabilities so they are hack-resilient.

Figuring out what is the current authoring mode in components in Adobe CQ can sometimes be a tricky prospect.  Determining the current authoring mode is important for component development when you may want to display different HTML or controls to authors than will be displayed to the end users.  As a best practice, the same interface should display in Author and Design mode, as hiding or showing components may affect design.

The new version of CQ5, Adobe Experience Manager 5.6, includes a contribution by Six Dimensions to the Apache Sling project.  This contribution adds a new method, getChildren to the Resource interface.  

How can you improve on the humble TextImage component; the basis for most Adobe CQ5 website implementations?  This component (as one would imagine from the name) allows authors to put both text and an image on the page.