Separating content from presentation

Question

Hello all, I'm currently evaluating WCMS options (including Adobe CQ) for a large client who needs a WCMS for managing products and marketing campaigns.
At first glance, CQ appears to be a WCMS on steroids. The technology stack is well considered and scalable, which provides a good building block for web content management. Furthermore, I'm impressed with its campaign management capabilities. All very promising.
However, my concern on it's suitability lies with it's content architecture. Here's the issue I'm looking solve: my client offers many different products (hardware and software) and services. For each of these products and services, they publish marketing collateral to:
The Internet (their website)
Their Intranet
A product brochure (pdf)
A range brochure (pdf of related products)
Sell sheet (2 page pdf with product overview and features)
Their problem (and I'm sure one shared by many others) is that if a product changes, for example a new feature is added, the content has to be updated in five separate places.
What I'm looking for is a single-source publishing solution where content is authored and controlled (for example workflow review and approval) in a central repository, then versioned and published to different formats (for example, a sell sheet would not include all detailed technical specifications).
I was hoping CQ would step up to this challenge of offering a CMS that where I can publish product content to the website and Intranet, while also creating versioned content (through API integration with InDesign Server). After all, Adobe provide cross-media publishing solutions...
However, CQ appears to break away from the classic MVC model and more specifically, it doesn't follow a typical CMS design by providing a clean separation of content from presentation. If the same content needs to be presented in different versions or formats, it appears that the only real way to achieve this is by duplicating the same content across different CQ components.
Am I missing something here?

Answer 1

Hi EliotHarper, thanks for your very well posted question.
Yes, separation between content and presentation is at the core of the WCM concepts, and CQ5 aims to solve this requirement in a clean way.
Generally speaking content is stored in the repository in the general form of nodes and properties and information related to its presentation is loosely coupled (and can reside somwhere else). The fact that the standard content hierarchy fits into the actual pages hierarchy is just the simples option to ensure authors an incontext experience in a natiral way. But depending on your project, youcan override this approach.
Based on your specific project requiremenets, you may choose from a set of different approaches. I'm mentioning 3 of them in more detail here.
1. Create different renderers for the same resource, to be used depending on where the resource is consumed.
for example /content/products/myproduct.html would render differently than /content/products/myproduct.detail.html
http://sling.apache.org/site/url-decomposition.html
2. Use references. The same resource can be reused (as a reference) in other places. Updates to the content are reflected everywhere, since others are only references to the same resource.
http://dev.day.com/docs/en/cq/current/wcm/default_components.html#Reference
3. Multisite management features. A piece of content (also at a deeper level than a page) can be rolled out to an arbitrary nuymber of 'live copies' at one time. Live copies provide a separate copy of the same content but with a link to the original content, to better manage updates.
http://dev.day.com/docs/en/cq/current/administering/multi_site_manager.html
Please let me know if this helps. Regards.