Magnolia CMS
Features List
Magnolia makes you a rockstar at administration, authoring, customization, design, asset management, internationalization, interoperability, mobile, multichannel, performance, security and teamwork. Here are the features to prove it.
Administration
| Feature | Description | EE Std | EE Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Configuration Extension | Configuration extension (a.k.a. "configuration inheritance") simplifies life for administrators and developers. You no longer need to copy a site or dialog configuration in order to customize it. A configuration can contain a link to the master configuration and add or overwrite any property as needed. This avoids duplication and lowers maintenance effort. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Backup | Backup is possible through various means, depending on your specific needs. The repository implementation might provide backup tools of its own itself. In addition, the default import/export mechanism can be used for backups. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Scheduled Backups | Configure time-based backups and define if version information should be exported as well. Backups can also be achieved by using the CRX content repository. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Backup of Revisions | Magnolia includes a backup facility which allows you to restore revisions of content. The backup feature is a helpful tool for migrations from one Magnolia instance to another, and allows to easily switch repositories or databases without losing any content. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Version Export/Import | Allows the user to backup all content including revisions, and import the version information as needed. This tool makes it possible to migrate all information from one system to another, for instance to change the underlying repository or database without losing version information. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Shell Access | With Magnolia CMS, you can access the repository through a command shell directly integrated in the GUI. This allows for powerful ad-hoc queries or data-manipulation. Implementations are available for a Groovy shell. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Single Download Installation | Magnolia is available as a bundle together with Apache Tomcat for immediate deployment without the need for additional software. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Compatibility With Tomcat | All editions of Magnolia are compatible with Tomcat application server. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Compatibility With JBoss | Both the Community and the Enterprise Edition are compatible with JBoss application server. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Automatic Form Generation |
Forms for data entry are generated automatically. The Magnolia Form module provides server-side data validation, logging and personalized confirmation mails. |
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| The Pulse | The Pulse will immediately notify you if something in your system needs attention. It updates you on content status, comments, requests and warnings. |
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| Task Management | Get instant visibility into open tasks. Easily check status and assign tasks to team members. Tasks are also integrated with The Pulse. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Compatibility with Websphere / Weblogic | Enterprise Edition Pro can be deployed on Websphere or Weblogic application server. | ✔ |
Content Creation
| Feature | Description | EE Std | EE Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Instant Inline Editing | With Magnolia, content authors no longer need to switch between different navigation mechanisms to make a small change on a web page. They can quickly switch to edit mode for any page currently being displayed in their browser and instantly edit within the exact same look and feel of the public website. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Personalization | Adapt content to visitors according to their preferences, needs and behavior by leveraging customer data. With personalization, your visitors will only see relevant content, raising engagement and conversion. | ✔ | |
| Content Apps | Apps are a powerful tool for everybody involved in content management. For authors, apps help them keep an overview at all times and enable them to focus on single tasks that are relevant to them. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Favorites | Define and manage your personal workspace with Favorites. Create shortcuts to your most common actions such as adding a specific page, creating a microsite or adding a new offer in the data module. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Browser-Based User Interface | All authoring tasks such as managing the site hierarchy and inline editing are carried out in a browser - no more client installations are needed, no platform dependencies need to be taken care of. | ✔ | ✔ |
|
Runs with Any Browser |
The authoring of Magnolia environment works in all major browsers. Authors can use the one they like best – not the one a software vendor likes best. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Move, Copy, Reorder | Authors can move or copy entire site-structures with ease in Magnolia. They can reorder pages and page content via drag and drop – directly in an Internet browser. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Versioning | All Magnolia content is automatically versioned. You can restore previous versions. You can configure the number of kept versions to balance between business needs and storage requirements. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Dynamic Lists | Pages, documents and any other kind of data can be queried from within Magnolia to display a dynamic list of digital content. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Web-Based Spell-Checker Support | You can configure the rich text editor to perform spell checking. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Scheduled AKA Time-Based Publishing | Magnolia allows content authors to activate or de-activate content based on various criteria. For example, content can be published or unpublished based on date and time. The combination of meta-data information and a powerful workflow engine make Magnolia CMS very flexible in this respect. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Marketing Tags Management | Control all your website marketing tags from a single console. Use the integrated tag repository to update thousands of pages with a single click. | ✔ | |
|
Access-Controlled Search Also Based on Metadata |
Search is fully access controlled within Magnolia CMS and returns only the content which users have access to. One can search over all accessible information or retrieve content by typed meta-data information such as author, year, keywords or any other information that has been configured as a search option. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Article Categorization (Tagging) | Categorization features enable editors to categorize articles and display them in grouped lists for hierarchical navigation or access through a category cloud. Furthermore, categories can be related to each other. Categorization allows you to build highly dynamic, interactive sites and can be customized to allow categorization of files in the DAM and items in the data module. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Themes | A theme defines the look & feel of a Magnolia website. Themes are managed independently from editorial content. This makes it easy to change the look & feel of your web-site. | ✔ | ✔ |
| User-Generated Content | User-generated content (UGC) can be clustered and thus made available at all public sites at the same time. Examples of UGC include the Forum, Commenting and Public User Registration. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Dependency Management of Content Elements | It is easy to see in Magnolia CMS if all the information a page depends upon will be available once it is published. In the opposite direction, the system also informs you which pages refer to a page. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Multi-Step Forms | Splitting a large form into multiple steps allows the visitor to focus on one step at a time while none of the provided data will be lost when going back. | ✔ | ✔ |
| UTF-8 Page Names | UTF-8 is ideal for SEO: you can use international characters for node names such as pages. Since the node names are used to build URLs, UTF-8 support means more options for your search engine optimization (SEO). | ✔ | ✔ |
| Friendly URLs | The URLs of web pages created with Magnolia are human readable. This makes them easy to communicate, easy to bookmark and easy to spider by search engines. | ✔ | ✔ |
| SEO | Magnolia CMS delivers content to the web optimized for search engines. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Accessibility Conformance | Magnolia templates follow the guidelines of W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG2m) as well as Germany's BITV (Barrierefreie Informationstechnik-Verordnung). | ✔ | ✔ |
| Webcasts, Video | Easily publish Web 2.0-style audio and video content via multiple channels. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Integrated Full-Text Search | Magnolia's integrated full-text search easily lets website authors and visitors find what they are looking for. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Google Sitemap Generation | Magnolia CMS automatically generates sitemap XML files to allow Google search engine spiders to crawl a site more intelligently. | ✔ | ✔ |
Customization
| Feature | Description | EE Std | EE Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apps |
With our rich UI widget set and framework, anybody can write custom, great looking content management Apps that integrate with Magnolia. Your Apps will look and feel like built-in Magnolia Apps: they are as easy to use, but reflect your custom business processes and your authors’ needs. |
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| Groovy | Groovy is a dynamic language for the Java platform with features similar to those of Python, Ruby, Perl, and Smalltalk. Groovy allows for a much more agile approach to implementing new functionality for your website, while retaining the full power, scalability and security of the Java stack. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Code Highlighting | Magnolia CMS assists administrators and designers when editing templates with code highlighting and line numbering. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Easy Integration of Third-Party Frameworks | Magnolia's high extensibility makes integration with other frameworks a snap. Examples are available for integration with Spring, Struts, and Stripes, as well as Blossom, Maglev and Grails. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Customizable, Extendable Workflow | Magnolia has integrated a JBPM workflow engine, which allows for extensive customization of workflows and the integration of Magnolia as part of a business process managed architecture. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Observation of Content Changes | Magnolia's observation mechanism allows you to observe changes to the repository and act upon them. This makes it straightforward to decouple business logic from events that trigger them and allows powerful extensions that react on data changes. | ✔ | ✔ |
| 100% Java / J2EE Compliance | Magnolia CMS is developed in Java and runs on any J2EE compliant application server. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Logging With Apache Log4J | Magnolia uses standard Log4j logging. Its extensive customization options allow developers to tailor logs to their particular needs. | ✔ | ✔ |
| RSS Generation and Aggregation | RSS feeds can easily be provided for web pages created within Magnolia CMS. Additionally, Magnolia can aggregate external RSS feeds and render them for inclusion in any web page. | ✔ | ✔ |
| JSR-283 Java Content Repository (JCR 2.0) |
Magnolia uses the JSR-283 standard API to access its content. This makes content storage independent of the CMS to avoid black-box content silos and allows the usage of various implementations. Additionally, JSR-283 makes it extremely easy to customize Magnolia and unify content access. | ✔ | ✔ |
Design & Templating
| Feature | Description | EE Std |
EE Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| STK | The Standard Templating Kit is a complete, out-of-the-box website layout that conforms to accessibility standards. It provides "templating best practice" and an extensive set of ready-made functionality that can easily be extended for custom designs and content output. The STK includes templates such as Home page, Section page, News, Events Calendar, Article, Image Gallery, Form, Categorized Articles, Glossary, FAQ and Sitemap. It also includes various templates for components (content types) including fancy teasers, text & image, HTML5 video, teasers, stages, tabbed content, latest events, latest news, commenting, forum, RSS aggregation, category cloud, contact details from address book and more. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Standard-Based Templating in JSP and Servlets | Utilize your existing Java knowledge – no need to learn proprietary script languages any more. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Unlimited Page and Component Design | Magnolia gives developers the flexibility they want while preserving corporate design guidelines. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Freemarker as a Template Language | The Templating Kit is written in Freemarker, which provides new possibilities and makes the development of templates faster and easier than using JSP. JSP remains fully supported and in true Magnolia-fashion, you can mix and match both templating languages to secure your investment and profit from the latest developments at the same time. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Custom Tag Library Speeds Up Templating | The Magnolia CMS tag library allows developers to customize the authoring environment and create templates in a fast, efficient and re-usable way. Magnolia additionally supports third-party tag libraries such as JSTL to minimize the amount of code developers have to write. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Pluggable Templating Engine | Site templating by default is done in JSP or Freemarker and allows unlimited page and component designs. The templating engine is pluggable and can be replaced by other implementations if so desired. Magnolia gives you the flexibility you want while preserving corporate design guidelines. | ✔ | ✔ |
Digital Asset Management
| Feature | Description | EE Std |
EE Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Digital Asset Management (DAM) | With Magnolia CMS' DAM you can easily combine web content management and digital asset management through a web-based application. Assign customizable meta-data and fine-grained access-rights to each assets and store, publish, categorize and retrieve documents efficiently. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Customizable, Standards-Based Metadata | Magnolia uses the Dublin Core meta data standard for rapid deployment and easy integration. Additionally, custom meta data fields can easily be changed through the GUI, are fully indexed and in every aspect look & feel exactly like the build-in meta data. Meta data fields allow you to categorize and retrieve content based not on the content itself, but on information about the content. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Pluggable DAM | Magnolia provides an API to integrate with custom asset management systems. By default, Magnolia ships with implementations for direct file upload (assets are stored on the web page they are used) and for the DAM (assets are stored independently of the page structure and can easily be reused). | ✔ | ✔ |
| Canto Cumulus DAM Connector | Cumulus DAM Connector allows you to connect a Canto Cumulus DAM to Magnolia. Cumulus is popular, enterprise-grade digital asset management platform that offers digital right management and many backend integrations, including Adobe Photoshop and InDesign. | ✔ | |
| Imaging Engine | The Imaging Engine significantly simplifies the publishing workflow, as Magnolia can now use a single source image to automatically generate a multitude of different images. This is especially useful for article teasers, which often use a different image format than the teased article. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Image Editor | While the Imaging Engine lets you define rules for how teaser images should be cropped, for example, Magnolia’s Image Editor allows you do manual work: perform cropping, flipping or rotating. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Structured Data Management | Magnolia allows for easy management of both unstructured and semi-structured content with the help of a hierarchical content repository. On top of that, Magnolia Content Apps provide an advanced environment to manage structured data. This approach is very flexible: in Magnolia, structured data is indexed and searchable. Access is unified, it can be activated, mirrored and treated exactly the same way as any other information in the system. Examples for structured content include product catalogs, employee directories or skill inventories. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Automatic Meta-Data Storage | Magnolia automatically saves meta-data for any content such as the name of an author and the last authoring date. |
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Internationalization
| Feature | Description | EE Std |
EE Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Multilingual Content | It is straightforward to manage and serve several languages from within Magnolia: you can either create one site content tree per language, use a single tree for all languages, or mix the two approaches. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Multilingual Admin Interface | The Magnolia user interface for content authors is available in English, Simplified Chinese, Czech, French, German, Japanese and Spanish. You can contribute to a community translation effort to increase coverage in other languages. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Translation | Magnolia speeds up translations for international enterprises that have to maintain sites in various languages. It allows to export and re-import all text translated by in-house teams or external agencies, in translation-friendly XLIFF or Excel format. | ✔ | ✔ |
Interoperability
| Feature | Description | EE Std |
EE Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| WebDAV | The WebDAV interface provides an easy entry path for users to create, edit and manage templates on the Magnolia CMS server as if they were residing on their local file system, and eliminates the need for any Java or system-specific knowledge when creating templates. | ✔ | ✔ |
| CMIS - Content Management Interoperability Services | Easily access and edit Magnolia documents with enterprise systems such as Sharepoint, Alfresco or Photoshop, as if they were local documents. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Integrate with your existing user management infrastructure (LDAP/ADS) | Magnolia Enterprise Edition makes it easy to deploy Magnolia in large scale intranet environments where an enterprise-grade user management infrastructure already exists. Magnolia is using the JAAS standard for authentication and authorization. Company-wide single-sign-on authentication mechanisms can be implemented. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Compatibility with Tomcat | All editions of Magnolia are compatible with Tomcat application server. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Compatibility with WildFly (JBoss AS) | Both the Community and the Enterprise Edition are compatible with WildFly (formerly JBoss application server.) | ✔ | ✔ |
| REST Web service | Manipulate content through a REST API. Create, read, update and delete pages, components, contacts or anything else that is stored in a named workspace. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Integrate with IBM WebSphere Commerce Suite |
Magnolia Websphere Commerce Suite (WCS) connector allows you to integrate a WCS store to Magnolia. WCS is a popular, enterprise-grade e-commerce platform that offers many backend integrations, including payment gateways, warehouse management, and call center management. |
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Mobile
| Feature | Description | EE Std |
EE Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Instant Mobile Sites | Make your websites instantly mobile by using Magnolia's unique Standard Templating Kit (STK). Your mobile site's look & feel is completely customizable and can be previewed for smartphone and tablet. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Mobile Preview | Magnolia CMS has built in previews for iPhone & iPad right from the page editing interface, so you know exactly which content will be rendered on which device and how it will look. You can even create your own customized previews for any other devices or Web content channels. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Editing on Mobile Devices | Magnolia 5 and its touch-driven interface put your CMS at your fingertips. You can create and edit content on tablets. | ✔ | ✔ |
Multichannel
| Feature | Channel | EE Std |
EE Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Channel Definition | Publish to the web, smartphone, tablet, ebook, newsletter or any other output channel from a single source. Channels can be defined by location, device or any user behavior you can define and even customize your own previews. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Multi-Site Support | Magnolia can manage multiple sites within a single installation. Sites can be completely independent or share content, templates or any other data between each other, depending on your needs. | ✔ | |
| Campaign Monitor | Increasingly, corporate newsletters are being distributed through third-party services to avoid the corporate domain getting blacklisted as a spammer by accident. Magnolia CMS includes a subscribe/unsubscribe user interface that interacts with Campaign Monitor. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Email Module | Attachments can be sent from within Magnolia CMS for HTML as well as plain text emails. When sending a page, images and links are automatically being processed. Email templates can be built with FreeMarker. The new mail module supports the "SMTP Service Extension for Secure SMTP over TLS" (see RFC2487). | ✔ | ✔ |
| Syndication and Staging | The built-in publish & subscribe mechanism allows you to syndicate content easily to any other Magnolia application. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Real-Time Insights | The Pulse allows you to always be on top of everything that is going on with your channels’ content. It will update you on content status, comments, requests and warnings, as well as offering content statistics. | ✔ | ✔ |
Performance & Scalability
| Feature | Description | EE Std |
EE Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Caching | Magnolia has its own caching mechanism to increase speed and minimize CPU load. The cache is being written to the file system and is automatically updated whenever needed. The cache is configurable by tree or by page. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Advanced Caching Strategies | The caching API allows for highly customizable caching strategies. Magnolia Enterprise Edition comes with a set of default strategies that provide superior caching behavior. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Unlimited Scalability, Clustering and Load-Balancing | The integrated publish & subscribe mechanism allows you to mirror your website to as many physically distributed servers as you want. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Transactional Activation | This Enterprise-only feature ensures that activated content is either published in its entirety to all Magnolia instances in a staging environment, or - should anything go wrong - no changes are performed at all. It ensures the integrity of the published content. | ✔ | ✔ |
Security
| Feature | Description | EE Std |
EE Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Role-Based User Management | Authors can define roles for content access and assign them to users to make sure each user has only the rights that he or she should have. Content can only be seen, read and changed by those who are allowed to do so. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Distributed Architecture | Magnolia is distributed as two web-applications, one acting as the authoring and one as the public environment. This allows for better security by having one application inside your firewall, and one outside. | ✔ | ✔ |
Teamwork & Collaboration
| Feature | Description | EE Std |
EE Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deletion Approval and Undo | Magnolia CMS supports non-immediate deletion and undo of deletion. Additionally, EE supports custom deletion workflows. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Address Book | The address book functionality allows users to centrally manage contact details within the Contacts App of Magnolia CMS. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Compare Versions | With Magnolia CMS, content authors never miss a beat of what has changed content-wise when they work in collaborative editorial teams. They can compare every detail of any edits to different page versions. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Workgroup Collaboration | The system can be set up in such a way that workgroups have shared access to resources, e.g. a folder in the document management system. | ✔ | ✔ |
