Magnolia: Java Open Source Enterprise Content Management System Review

If you have gone through our previous reviews on open source Enterprise Content Management Systems, such as eZpublish and Alfresco, then you will be interested to know that we have tried and tested Magnolia now and below is our review on this simple ECM system.

What is Magnolia

Based in Basel (Switzerland), Magnolia International Ltd. is the developer of Magnolia, the first commercial open-source enterprise content management (ECM) system to seamlessly integrate web content management and document management through one intuitive, web-based, AJAX-powered user interface.

Magnolia Enterprise Edition enables users to easily combine web content management and document management through a web-based application; assign customizable metadata and fine-grained access-rights to each document; and store, publish, categorize, and retrieve documents efficiently. It is ideally suited for intranet and extranet applications.

Features

Genuine

For a user’s perspective, the biggest changes have come from a special project called Genuine that revamps the administration and content contribution user interface (”Admin Central”). Genuine started with a critique of the current UI which lead into an initiative to improve Admin Central’s usability and extensibility.

The primary goal of this project is to ease development and maintenance of the Magnolia back-end to make it more robust, more customizable and less error prone when changes are applied.
In short the targets are:

• ease-of-development
• extensibility
• customization
• usability
  • effectiveness & efficiency
  • error robustness
  • satisfaction

Customization

Customizations may be parked in modules, which can be updated independently of Magnolia — meaning you can customize like a madman without hurting your upgradability.

Modularization

The offering’s complete modularization, another new feature, makes it possible to do this without affecting Magnolia’s default distribution.

I18N, the internationalization architecture

This makes it possible to manage and publish content in multiple languages from one source (a non-convoluted form of single source CMS). This has been added as a default feature, but can be customized with custom translation workflows.

Write Output from Existing Application

t’s also easier to write output from existing applications — including Adobe ColdFusion, Freemarker or Apache Wicket — to Magnolia. Users can also validate input that originates from Magnolia without losing access to the complete set of data.

Knowing Magnolia

Storage

Magnolia stores all its data (website content, but also configuration, for instance) in JCR. JCR stands for Java Content Repository and is one of the standards defined via Java standardization process. JCR provides set of standard Java APIs used to store, search and retrieve hierarchical data. Wikipedia has a decent article and links about JCR.

Admin Central

The main entry point for using Magnolia is the “Admin Central”: much like a file navigator, items in the tree view can be double-clicked to be opened, and a right-click will open a context menu providing more actions. The left side menu provides links to several workspaces (”Website”, “Documents”, “Configuration”, etc) as well as shortcuts for pre-defined locations. (specific configuration items, tools etc)

Configuration

Clicking on the configuration menu item shows the configuration hierarchy in a tree view. Most of Magnolia’s configuration happens in this tree. (common examples are templates, caching, subscribers etc)

Security

Magnolia has a role-based security mechanism and supports user groups. Security can be applied at request level (URL-based security) and at content level. Content level security can be applied on any part of the JCR repository. (including configuration)

Modules

Magnolia provides a module mechanism which allows developers to add functionality: several are delivered with Magnolia (Cache, DMS, Mail, Workflow, Samples), more are available for possible inclusion (Data, Forum, Scheduler), and you’re also encouraged to build your own.

Screenshots

Conclusion

Magnolia has a very simple interface and is very easy to use. Give us your feedback about it and what can be improved or what you liked about it.You can download Magnolia from here

[thanks to: magnolia community and cmswire.com]