Item: Magnolia
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The company where I work has been a Magnolia partner for almost a decade. I started working with the product more than 5 years ago and since then I have been involved in many different types of projects, covering customers in areas such as tourism, aviation, and public administration. My work with Magnolia consists of developing the functionality needed by each of these customers, doing version migrations, and solving the problems that we encounter.

Pros and Cons

Ease of page setup for user editors
Personalization of content based on the characteristics of the visiting user
Open source makes developers' lives easier
Intuitive interface

Use of JCR limits the amount of content that can be handled efficiently.
The latest version has made it more complicated to customize content apps than in previous versions.
It has a steep learning curve for new developers.

Return on Investment

Headless solutions without the need for development
Extensive configuration depending on the environment in which it is to be deployed
Problems with node corruption, disk space and JCR usage issues

Usability

Magnolia makes it easy to use for content editors, everything is focused on making it easy to use for this type of user. However, the learning curve can be steep and the concept of publishing can be complicated at first for certain types of users. As for the administrator or developer user, I see it as more complicated and the documentation could be improved.

Performance

Magnolia is efficient in loading pages and content as long as the content is structured in folders of less than 2000 items. Above these elements and with content that requires many properties, efficiency drops and can become slow. This is a limitation that has more to do with the JCR nodes than with the product itself.

Favorite Features of Magnolia

The best features of magnolia are the possibility of customizing pages, both through fully customizable components and through the use of the customization module and its traits. The possibility of creating actions and commands to be used by end-users, and the ability to customize some of its features to suit customer needs.

Alternatives Considered

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

One of the most important points that magnolia has over other products is the possibility of extending its functionalities. Being open-source, it is possible to inspect how everything is done and replicate it to change functionalities. In this way, many features that customers need and would otherwise not be able to cover are covered.

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?

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

Sourcetree, Jira Software, Atlassian Confluence

Likelihood to Recommend

Magnolia is well suited for cases where Magnolia is going to be used to make web pages where an editor needs to make changes or edit the content on certain pages. In cases where you have a small volume of content and want to customize the content based on user characteristics. Also if you want to use it as headless. Magnolia does not fit when you want to use the CMS as a back-office or to manage a large amount of content that needs to be referenced as you would in a relational database. It is not suitable for content that is related to other content and has different types of content as children.

Magnolia is a product that allows a high degree of customization for both publishers and developers

Overall Satisfaction with Magnolia