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Magnolia V4.5

Score6.6 out of 10

7 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Magnolia V4.5?

Magnolia is an Open-Source content management system (CMS) developed by Magnolia International Ltd., based in Basel, Switzerland. It is based on Content repository API for Java. The upgrade from V 4.5 to 5.0 created such a materially different product that the releases before and after this upgrade are listed as two different products. This is the listing for the older versions (4.5 and earlier)

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Magnolia V4.5 Reviews

What users are saying about Magnolia V4.5.
View all Magnolia V4.5 reviews

Magnolia - there is a lot to learn

Incentivized
Rossen Angelov
Development Manager of Information Technology in Information Technology at University of Chicago (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Magnolia uses JCR on the back-end, which I think allows for a good robust architecture
  • The community edition allows for extending Magnolia and JCR API to implement the desired custom behavior
  • Has a distributed architecture represented by an Author and Public instances
  • Magnolia has a good and reliable ACL structure, which is easy to configure and use in custom implementations

Cons

  • Better admin interface. The features the current interface provides are not very user friendly. Certain features can be extended and overwritten, but most can't.
  • Better integration with JCR and more clearly exposing classes and methods for interacting with the repository
  • Better handling of the versioning control and deletion from the repository
  • Better community support from Magnolia's development team

Return on Investment

  • For us Magnolia enables us to have solid web presence with our products and we can easily roll out more websites and still customize features and behavior.
  • The reasons we picked Magnolia as our CMS platform were completely technical rather than business related and as a result the benefits are in the technical design and the implementation area.

Magnolia: a user-friendly CMS that tries to be all things to all users and generally succeeds

Michael Conner
Webmaster at Texas State University (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Adding and editing content paragraphs easily with WYSIWYG rich text editor
  • Automatically updating links to pages within website that have been renamed or moved within content navigation by webmaster
  • Hosting uploaded assets, such as images for display directly on a page or documents downloadable by end users, in either a Document Management System or in content paragraph-specific folders

Cons

  • Magnolia AdminCentral (the CMS user interface) is slow; really only works well over fast internet connections, telecommuters dependent on public WiFi networks or tethered cellular connections can find it frustrating
  • Rich text editor sometimes adds new paragraph tags seemingly out of nowhere upon saving new content paragraph, requiring cleanup via source code editing
  • Experienced and more technically-minded users can get the feeling that the newbie-friendly nature of Magnolia gets in the way of getting work done quickly, requiring too many mouse clicks to do something

Return on Investment

  • Faster turnaround time on website updates; information more easily provided to customer base (students)
  • Potential new hires better able to make informed decisions about our department based on our web presence
  • Lack of flexibility can waste webmaster time by forcing him or her to look for alternative implementations within Magnolia framework

Magnolia CMS Review: a flower in the Java CMS garden

Sebastian Galvão
Consultant in Information Technology at Bank BTG Pactual (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Create new content based on templates and dialogs
  • Easy to setup, easy deploy and configuration
  • Integration with templating languages like Freemarker

Cons

  • Error handling: sometimes things simply don't work and the messages and logs are not that helpful.
  • Limited support: have never used the enterprise support, but the community support is very limited. The documentation is not awesome.
  • Old fashioned admin interface

Return on Investment

  • Manage multiple sites with Magnolia with one setup
  • Edit content in real-time so customers can always see updated data

Fits (almost) all purposes and is a developer's delight

Marcel van den Brink
Software Engineer in Engineering at Info.nl

Pros

  • Easy to understand and to use interface for web editors
  • Easily extendable by Java developers
  • Good support from Magnolia
  • Scales very well

Cons

  • Does not support User Generated Content very well (like reactions on an article on the website)

Return on Investment

  • Customers are very happy with an understandable authoring interface.
  • Support for customers is very quick.
  • Magnolia as a company does not do any projects themselves. Leads coming from potential customers are forwarded to their partners.

Magnolia - a mixed bag; depending on how you use it.

Siddharth Naik
Supervisor - Web Development Team in Information Technology at World Travel Holdings (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

  • The community edition has most of the features available without any hidden gotchas.
  • Easy download and install process.
  • Good community support.
  • Simple to use: straight forward template writing, intuitive workflow, easy publishing
  • Can write templates in freemarker and JSP
  • Java-based CMS hence no need to learn additional language like PHP
  • Easy to create dialog boxes for content writers

Cons

  • The community edition doesn't have version control and content locking as of version 4.1
  • Can't enforce validation to the dialog box for content writers.
  • Content re-use needs to be improved. As of version 4.1 the same content has to be entered multiple times if its displayed multiple times on the web.
  • Can't use Magnolia for dynamic content (application specific data) without customization.
  • The newer version of community edition can't publish to multiple subscribers; so you have to manually replicate for multiple production instances.
  • The community edition doesn't have a way to lock the content while editing. So you have to be careful that people don't overwrite content in multi-user scenario.

Return on Investment

  • Positive: Faster publishing of content and hence customers converting better to one-day-sale scenarios.
  • Positive: Better maintenance due to separation of work between IT and content authors
  • Negative: Once in a while content overwriting (stepping on to each others content)

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