Magnolia: Authoring & Development High Level Overview
September 17, 2021
Magnolia: Authoring & Development High Level Overview

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Magnolia
Magnolia is used across different business departments (3 Magnolia systems supporting several portal sites). The main business problem being addressed is to split different authoring/editing activities into multiple teams. There is heavy usage of light modules so many separate frontend teams can focus on creating frontend apps on top of Magnolia systems.
Pros
- Easy to start authoring (simplicity during editing pages/ components) as the UX is straightforward for newcomers.
- Flexibility by proving light modules that helps front-end developers work independently compared to backend/Java modules' developers.
- The personalization mechanism is easy to use (the variants/traits logic is really simple to familiarize yourself with).
- The multiple site mechanism is easy to set up (for EE version) even for non-developers.
- YAML configuration flexibility is easy to change on the fly (for developers).
Cons
- There is a need for out of the box ready & reusable components (customizable components, e.g. banners).
- Resource (js) loading mechanism (resources can be added at multiple levels: e.g. pages, components, files, etc.) is very hard to manage sometimes in real projects.
- The drag 'n drop of components in UI author is not supported.
- Documentation needs a lot of improvement, especially for migration to the newest version (Magnolia 6.2).
- It would be nice to add integrations with other CMS systems (e.g. Adobe AEM, Hybris, etc.) or other systems in general.
- I would appreciate more dynamic renditions for images/assets (e.g. now there are only predefined dimensions - thumbnails/medium, etc.).
- I would appreciate improved functionality for publishing & unpublishing during a specific date & time.
- It improved page loading time due to caching mechanism for pages with many different components.
- The integration of different frontend (Angular/ React) apps with Magnolia (as a backend system) made use of the light modules.
- It provides a custom Magnolia system to authors/publishers using the decoration mechanism (e.g. same app but different configuration per role using decorations).
- Negative: the flexibility of deploying light modules sometimes is easily propagating errors into the production systems.
Used CMS: Hybris CQ5/Adobe CMS AEM
Do you think Magnolia delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Magnolia's feature set?
Yes
Did Magnolia live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Magnolia go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Magnolia again?
Yes
Magnolia Feature Ratings
Upgrading Magnolia
Yes - The release was smooth during deployment. However, lots of issues were found during analysis and real implementation. Sometimes, documentation was lacking for features or migration guidelines from Magnolia 5.7 to 6.2.
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