Item: Magnolia
Rating: 9
Author: Vipul Tiwari

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Magnolia for the last few years and we are using it to manage content on our website mainly products. It's being used by 2-3 business unit. We choose to use Magnolia CMS so the marketing team can manage content on the website. They can edit, modify, remove and publish new products to the website without the help of a developer so the developer can focus more on engineering work.

Pros and Cons

Customer support is remarkable
Single page application(SPA) support. Provide fast and seamless experience to customer.
Magnolia marketplace where many prebuild modules are available which can be integrated easily.

Migration from one major version to another major version is painful.
It's difficult to search content on the admin apps like pages, assets and jcr tool.
Java expertise required to extend some core functionality

Return on Investment

Time to market a product is reduced as no dev help is required and marketing can manage the content of the website.
Magnolia uses caching technology so the page is cached once rendered which allows faster load time
Dependency on java developers so we had to hire few java developer

Usability

It's very easy to set up a website using Magnolia CMS. Magnolia support team is delivering what they have promised. They have a very useful prebuild app like the story to create a blog also the marketplace has many modules which can be integrated easily and very useful like imaging-module is very useful to manage image on the website.

Performance

Magnolia page load is pretty fast if you are using static page since the content is being fetched from JCR also the page can be cached to Memcached once rendered to avoid multiple rendering of the same page. In case of dynamic content page-load will depend on how the call to a third party application perform. In our case most of the product page load approximately in 1s which I believe is certainly good.

Favorite Features of Magnolia

Content API and content preview are my favourite feature of magnolia. Content preview allows the author to quickly check how does content will look like before publishing it to everyone.
Content API is useful to fetch raw content from magnolia which cab be later used to render on a different device as pert requirement.

Key Insights

Do you think Magnolia delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Magnolia's feature set?

Yes

Did Magnolia live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Magnolia go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Magnolia again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Redis, IntelliJ IDEA, React

Likelihood to Recommend

Magnolia CMS is well suited for small businesses which have a few hundreds of products to manage on the website as searching content on different apps like pages, assets and JCR tool become as content increased. It will also suit those company which have java expertise in, it will allow them to create module and apps quicky if needed. Also managing deployment, debugging and performance tuning would be easier as magnolia is developed on Java.

Customizable content management for eCommerce

Overall Satisfaction with Magnolia