Item: Magnolia
Rating: 7
Author: Tou Xiong

Overall Satisfaction with Magnolia

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Magnolia CMS gives our business partners a quick and easy way to manage content on their websites. The ability to change content without going through a deployment process has been one of the best feature Magnolia CMS has provided. The product was initially used only in specific areas of the organization but now it has spread to a lot more lines of businesses. With Magnolia CMS, we have given more control of content to the business and empowered them take control instead of IT bottlenecking their needs.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Content Management within Magnolia CMS is well structured. Developers are given the freedom to choose how content will be manage and are even given the ability to connect to other systems from within Magnolia.
Magnolia CMS's ease of use for the business is a big win for the product. The business partners have the ability to go into Magnolia CMS to make quick edits and publish content easily due how when they are editing their site, it still looks exactly like the live site, except with overlays.
Magnolia CMS constant improvements on its REST APIs has helped our other systems leverage Magnolia CMS heedlessly more effectively over the years. Initial support for our Angular apps with Magnolia was difficult at first, but with recent improvements, the headless approach with Magnolia CMS has become more streamlined.

Cons

Magnolia CMS documentation could use some work. Particularly, more thorough examples of usage of a particular feature can greatly help with understanding the full scope a feature can provide.
For version 6.x of Magnolia CMS, I find the Find Bar to be a performance hog and at times imprecise. Specifically, when searching the Configurations app for a specific module, most times it returns nested matches instead of the parent module.
The publish and include subside feature is a double-edge sword. It is convenient feature when working with small subset of content. However, as soon as the content grow larger and nested, this feature can bring down our server.

Return on Investment

Magnolia CMS definitely helped with improving website development and release of new sites. Many pieces of a template can be reused in Magnolia CMS so this helps with building a new site since not everything has to be build from the ground up again.
Magnolia CMS has provided us as the ability to consolidated our rogue sites into one centralized platform. The biggest benefit is being able to manage sites easily, thus business partners were less incline to resist moving from their current system to Magnolia CMS.

Usability

For what Magnolia CMS does, content management, it does well. It does aim to do more than that though and some points it hits well while others it fails through. For example, it delivers new features to enhance the platform, which is a plus. However, I feel necessary documentation on the new feature's full capability is not well documented. New features are good but if it lacks thorough documentation, it may be ignored. It is fair that the typical use case for the feature is present, but most times, users use case is never that straightforward.

Performance

Overall, I am happy with Magnolia's performance. Though, given version 6.x, the Find Bar gives me concern. A contributing factor could be that we have a lot of content, but I would expect to Magnolia to be able to handle it. What I think may be valuable would be to know the limits of certain apps. For example, the Assets app, recommended files per directory, recommended nested folders, etc. I believe, eventually this starts having performance issues.

Likelihood to Recommend

Magnolia CMS has a great use case when business partners wants to take into their own hands of managing a website. Magnolia CMS makes it easy to hand control over because the interface in the Pages app is quiet intuitive once users are shown how to work it.

At the time, a scenario where Magnolia CMS was not suited for our organization when the idea of separation between code and content arose. The "code side" was created using Angular while the "content side" was Magnolia. The integration between the two was difficult but as of now, Magnolia CMS has amended those failing and it has improved this scenario for us.

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Magnolia CMS Review