CQ aka AEM | Blueprints vs. Live copies

Question

In cq we can create live copies by either blueprints by opting "New Site..." or directly trough content nodes by opting for "New Live Copy...".

In both the cases inheritance is maintained and roll-out works too in same ways. So what is the advantage of using one over other.

Any views?

Answer 1

Live Copies

Live copies can be created for just a simple page or a tree of pages and might the page and it's subpages depending on the rollout configuration. A live copy can be linked to a rollout config or will use the system's default one. There is no formal requirement on the source page's structure. A live copy might reference a blueprint, while it can only reference to a single blueprint.

Blueprints

Blueprints target the rollout of complete multilingual website projects and are a tool to control multiple rollout configs and live copies. A blueprint requires a certain structure for the source site: - One root level page - The root's immediate childs define the language branches of the site - each language contains one or more child pages.

Blueprints allow you to control multiple live copies and centrally consistent rollout configs for the blueprint's live copies. A blueprint rollout will push modifications to all it's live copies.

Usage scenarios of blueprints

Inheritance and rollout work the same way. Just because blueprint make use of live copies. But blueprints help you to organize your rollout scenarios for large multilingual sites. Just imagine a corporate website that provides a two or even three digit number of locales which that need to be translated and kept in sync. In such a scenario you will likely end up with a hardly understandable and maintainable number of live copy and rollout configurations. Depending on a blueprint to e.g. standardize the rollout of a new language/market/locale provides you higher degree of governance over your process as the complete process centrally manageable through the blueprint template.

But as long as you do not have such a scenario you might be fine without having the complete blueprint overhead.

Answer 2

A Livecopy is defined in the target page node with a cq:LiveSyncConfig node. It basically defines: I am a livecopy of source (blueprint) page X, and the following rollout configs apply.

A Blueprint is defined in the source page node with a cq:BlueprintSyncConfig node, and this defines a target.

Essentially both achieve the same in the end, but I think there are a few differences: the first option can be used to create a 1:n relationship, whereas the second option is 1:1

Also, if page nodes are copy-pasted in AEM, then relationships are copied with them (not quite sure in which way exactly, you would have to try for both scenarios). Also when pages are deleted in a tree in the first scenario, AEM will add a cq:excludedPaths property to the config which causes the page to be skipped in future rollouts - not sure this is the same for cq:BlueprintSyncConfig as well.