Founded in 1997 with a vision to create the first truly open content management system, Magnolia is presented as a fast way to launch digital experiences. With a mission to help clients move fast and stay flexible and boasting users among brands like Atlassian and The New York Times, Magnolia DXP supports industries ranging from automotive to telecommunications, offering enterprise features and headless agility to help them stay ahead. From humble beginnings in Basel, Magnolia's…
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Siteglide
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Siteglide is a content management software offering from the company of the same name headquartered in Aldermaston.
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.
As already mentioned, migrating websites from Adobe Business Catalyst, or any other platform is a strength. Using the Siteglide CLI, websites can be migrated as a static site to Siteglide, thus greatly reducing the amount of work necessary for the migration. Also, as long as developers are acquainted with HTML, CSS, Liquid, and Javascript, building sites with Siteglide can be done rapidly using their Siteglide Studio site builder. One of the additional strengths of Siteglide is Webapps. These can be easily used to provide the display and manipulation of dynamic data. The site can be designed so that users can change information without knowing anything about the underlying code. It allows a form-driven way to update site pages.
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.
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.
Billing plans occasionally cost more than competition, mainly because of the way Platform OS works
"Drag and Drop" website building and maintenance could be improved in order to compete with other site-builders. Less reliance on knowing HTML, CSS, Liquid, Javascript, etc. would be a good direction to go in the future.
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.
There could be an improvement for "non-programmers" and drag and drop editing. However, Siteglide's target market of website development agencies is well served and a great fit. Sites can be migrated from other platforms quickly and easily. New responsive websites can be developed quickly using Siteglide Studio and then robust functionality can be built out quickly and reliably. There is a wide range of features included in Siteglide and more features and upgrades are being rapidly added. The environment is built on a stable and performance-oriented platform. This allows agencies to provide excellent service on a worldwide basis.
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.
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
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.
Siteglide knocks the socks off Duda in terms functionality, it's eCommerce isn't a match for Shopify (yet) but it's got a lot more flexibility and functionality than Shopify which comes up short if businesses want to do more than sell products...and versus WordPress, well, it's just much more professional and doesn't fall on its arse.
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.