Magnolia for quick/easy publishing
March 31, 2021

Magnolia for quick/easy publishing

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Magnolia

We use Magnolia as the CMS for our main corporate website. It was implemented as part of our re-design and re-launch in 2019, a project by the corporate and IT team. Today, there are multiple groups of users, including the communications/web team, the customer support teams, as well as the various product marketing teams, few who have "web design experience." It allows us to create and publish webpages in an easy and efficient way.
  • Easy interface to adopt to publish webpages.
  • Great standard components/templates used as building blocks to build your pages.
  • Customizable to suit specific business needs.
  • Site speed has been an issue in the past, but has gotten better.
  • Customer service has been a bit hit/miss in the past, but has also gotten better with our latest account exec.
  • A few years later, we are seeing errors/mistakes in the way some customizations were done by our agency, something the benefit of customization, also lends itself to.
  • Where product marketing teams used to rely on agencies to build landing pages for new campaigns, they are often now being built through Magnolia.
  • Thanks to the training and expertise of our web team, we have been able to prove that in-house specialization can and has often been more agile to launch new creative, pages, etc.
  • During COVID, etc., it has been one of the easiest ways to get information out to customers, employees, etc.
From a CMS user perspective, it has great overall usability. For 95% of the use cases that our team(s) use Magnolia for - creating products, publishing new campaign pages, updating press releases - it works great. In some cases, where the ask is over and above that, or the ability to design new components, integrating non-Magnolia forms, etc., it takes time/effort to test/implement and hope it doesn't break the site.
Speed has always been an issue for us - especially when it comes to publishing and approving pages to publish, particularly when there are multiple pages in the queue, i.e. when we are launching a new set of products at the same time, on the same date. Recently, in testing 6.2, we ran into some major speed/loading issues, but this was resolved. We don't use reports, so can't comment on that; and have integrated little-to-no other systems (lack of experience, time to test and implement is too narrow if/when we are approached by another group for a solution).
Have used quite a few home-grown/built as well as web/CMS (i.e. blog) platforms. Magnolia offers the ease of many of these platforms, but also provides a platform that is strong enough that you can be confident to build your brand's corporate website on it.
It has been great for our external corporate website, which hosts particularly content/text. Our ecommerce website is built on another platform, but unsure how Magnolia would be suited for this kind of instance. Similarly, we have investigated Magnolia for our use in our internal corporate website but opted to use Sharepoint, a system already in-place, that could be turned around more quickly. We are finding challenges with some of our users who continue to create landing pages outside of Magnolia (using Wordpress or other CMS/design platforms), which they have found 'easier' to implement alongside their marketing automation software.

Magnolia Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
9
Code quality / cleanliness
8
Admin section
6
Page templates
7
Mobile optimization / responsive design
7
Publishing workflow
8
Form generator
7
Content taxonomy
7
SEO support
4
Bulk management
3
Availability / breadth of extensions
Not Rated
Community / comment management
Not Rated
API
Not Rated
Internationalization / multi-language
3
Role-based user permissions
4