Likelihood to Recommend Magnolia is a very capable DXP, that provides client with lots of flexibility in composing its own stack. While the core of the platform is a content management system, the open architecture of Magnolia DXP allows it to connect to any platform, allowing client to extend the capabilities. One scenario would be a centralized content hub - where through a single platform, content authors can choose which channel to distribute what content. For example, long form content for consumers viewing on a laptop, short form content for those using a mobile browser. This allow the client to personalized the experience based on channels. Another scenarios would be leveraging on GenAI - using Magnolia's built-in connector to ChatGPT. If that is not the service that one desire, you can always connect to another AI service such as Google Gemini. With GenAI, connected, content author can use AI as co-pilot to help them scale up their content production.
Read full review Is your business an enterprise level business that has more than a half dozen different content types? If so, then you might want to use a dedicated CMS rather than Movable Type. Movable Type is best used on small / medium sized businesses and is not the best solution for a full-fledged CMS. If you're using your content for something other than just displaying a website, then it's probably not for you. Movable Type works great for news/blogging sites. In fact, Daring Fireball, one of the most popular Apple-centric blogs is using Movable Type as its publishing platform.
Read full review Pros Speed of development - time to delivery from zero to MVP was excellent Ease of use - the authoring experience is very easy to build and train PAAS/SAAS - the managed service platform removed the traditional overhead of running in-house technologies, meaning we could focus on value add, with less time spent keeping the lights on. Read full review Easy to use straight out of the box, very user friendly with an intuitive interface. Great for team use where there are multiple editors and writers fixing and editing each other's works. It's easy to track who last made the latest edits. Stellar support team and system. I've found that Moveable Type's support system is generally more responsive and helpful than WordPress. Read full review Cons The documentation provides samples that are often out of context, and difficult to know where the provided example code should be implemented. More tutorials providing the full project or step-by-step instructions on how to implement subject material would help greatly. Baeldung is a resource I would consider the gold standard in how this is done in other spaces. The use of JCR and Nodes makes object serialization/deserialization painful. Jackson compatibility or similar would be a welcome enhancement to the developer experience. Maybe leveraging code-gen from light modules to build model classes when possible could help accomplish this. Modifying the home layout from light modules is frustrating. It seems that any configuration overrides made merge with the default rather than overwriting, which makes for a difficult combination of guess-and-check while referencing the documentation to see what should be in each row/column when making changes. Including "mark all as read" or "delete all" in the notifications app would be a great quality of life improvement. It seems that by default, users have to individually select messages and operate them. Read full review Especially on the older versions, the limited number of well-developed third-party plugins is problematic for efficiently developing a well-functioning website. Versions of movable type which didn't allow pages to be constructed were difficult to create continuity in design and easily editable pages for our editors. The installation process could be simplified to make it easier for those new to a CMS to install. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have invested a lot of time and energy into tailoring a solution that works for the company.
We think the new features in v6.2 will help us get to the next level
We also don't have the resources to rebuild a website platform from scratch even if we wanted to
Read full review I think there are still improvements to be made. I haven't tapped in to the full functionality of the CMS yet but the rating I give it now is only based on what I've been able to use it for
Read full review Usability We've shown it to a number of users both clients and our own team and despite initial apprehensions, they "get it" very quickly. It's intuitive and friendly and quick to perform daily tasks. We once had a client tell us "Using Magnolia makes me smile" which says it all for us.
Read full review Performance I gave [it] 7/10 only because of the loading time of pages. Otherwise, I think it deserves an 8. Normally this is not an issue per [se] but considering the rating matrix and as I have been asked to honestly write about it. Yes, the page loading times could be improved.
Read full review Support Rating You always get an answer based on your SLA. But you always get a solution. That's the successfactor in this case. To often i was frustrated about people in a company without even a clue what there product is about or how to solve a problem. Magnolia's Support Team does a very good job and try to help you in most of the cases
Read full review Alternatives Considered I've used several CMSs like AEM and EpiServer, and comparatively, they all excel at different things. Magnolia is the best to develop for/against. Episerver has the best/most fluid UI in terms of content editing, and the overall admin experience AEM is just all around sucks.
Read full review Movable Type can be compared to WordPress. It's easy to use, and I would say Movable Type is actually more user-friendly.
Read full review Return on Investment Magnolia has brought about positive impacts. For instance, we need not outsource web design and marketing services because thanks to this software, we can handle most work inhouse The software is affordable with no compromises on capabilities and therefore it is gives us value for money. The templates makes the whole process easy Read full review Provided a blogging platform when we needed one. Helped us compare other blogging platforms as a baseline for what minimums we require and what we don't want. Users often refused to use Movable Type and would go around our official system in order to use my more friendly software. Read full review ScreenShots