Item: Magnolia
Rating: 9
Author: Antonio Miguel Pérez Rivera

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We build custom Magnolia applications for our clients, as Magnolia CMS has the following capabilities our clients need: Editing and viewing instances separation: Allowing publisher users to preview/modify content before public users Possibility of implementing custom workflows Possibility of having more than one public instance in order to achieve high availability Headless capacities Centralize the different content types in custom Magnolia Content Apps Possibility of serving different pages/components depending on the language of the user or region from which it connects

Pros and Cons

Custom workflows
Headless capabilities
Different Author / Public instances
Traits
Multi-site capabilities

Publishing mechanism is slow if the number of elements to be published is high
Allows only one content type per content app in the newest versions
Common problems with Lucene indexes

Return on Investment

Improved page creation times
Improved page load times
Improved the ability of the users to manage the content

Usability

Clean layout, apps organized in groups for better understanding, ability to edit content in one instance and visualize it in a different one, ability to have custom publishing workflows, ability to connect to Magnolia using the own organization's active directory, possibility of creating variations of pages/components at the click of a button

Performance

Overall, Magnolia's performance is good in terms of speed (Load times are low, both when serving pages to end-users and when editing content) However, being a Java application, memory consumption is sometimes high, which can end up affecting the general performance of the system on which it is installed.

Alternatives Considered

Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP), WordPress and Adobe Experience Manager

Good documentation and examples Online demos to mess with and test functionalities Easier to install Better knowledge about the product Ability to centralize content of the same type in apps Better performance in some scenarios Better usability: In the newest versions, Magnolia has, among other functionalities, a search engine that allows us to access the application or desired content from the main screen

Key Insights

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

Other Software Used

Eclipse, Apache Solr, Elasticsearch

Likelihood to Recommend

Magnolia is perfect for Building simple landing pages Building complex websites Providing a simple way to allow the marketing users to manage the information that will be displayed in the public pages Allowing different users (With different groups and roles) to edit the content at the same time, On the other hand, Magnolia is not so well-suited to, for example, build Intranets, since there are specific products for this case.

Magnolia review

Overall Satisfaction with Magnolia