Do 4.x Sites and Syndicated Gadgets/Publications still exist?

Question

I was looking for how the 5.x platform syndicates content and I'm having trouble finding it. Does the functionality in 4.x of Sites, Syndicated Gadgets and Publications still exist? Or has it been replaced by another technology? Or has the idea been dropped altogether?
Is there a cross reference that has been published that shows all of the features that existed in previous platforms that have been renamed or dropped from the current product. There is a summary in the upgrade guide of features that have been renamed, but it may not explain everything.

Answer 1

We designed these features in 4.x to support syndication of content to other web sites outside the portal. When we were designing 5.0, we took a look at how our customers were using this feature and found that most actually used it as a caching mechanism to enhance portlet preformance. They would write a portlet that generates a report using expensive queries against slow back-end systems, then convert the portlet to a "syndicated gadget" and write another gadget to load and display the most recent copy of the syndicated content on MyPages and Communities. A common complaint was that this process involved so many unnecessary steps: creating a Site, copying all the Gadget object settings into a new Syndicated Gadget object, adding it to the Site, etc.
In 5.0, you can "syndicate" a portlet by simply adding it as an operation to a job, without creating any new objects. When you run the job, it runs the portlet and saves the output to a file. We've also added the "Stored Content" portlet (part of the Optional Enterprise Web Components package) that will load this file and display it in a MyPage or Community for you. We did cut the syndication site functionally that allowed you to publish URLs to the syndicated content, we found that it didn't add much value over just putting the files on an IIS or Apache web share protected by basic auth.