Item: Magnolia
Rating: 9
Author: Andrew Elia

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We mostly use and recommend Magnolia for enterprise clients who want a lean, easy to use platform for managing their content (not just on the web). However we do also use it internally for our own website as well.

It's not the only solution our clients use as everyone has different requirements. Why do we use it and recommend it to others when we do see a fit ? Quite simply, it's a well engineered product which has always been ultra reliable whenever we've deployed it to the dozens of clients who we've worked with it on. We don't like implementing solutions that we have to constantly prod and patch to keep working, and for us Magnolia saves us time, money and credibility. Our clients are always happy to use it because it is simple to use and takes minimal training.

Pros and Cons

Reliability
Ease of use
Rapid development and deployment
Performance
Robust and secure architecture

Improve coverage in North America and the Middle East
Arab and Mandarin languages in admin central
Less reliance on JCR for back end storage interface

Return on Investment

Rapid time to market. We have managed to turn around replatforming projects in a matter of weeks.
Integration. The API access is really helpful and we've been able to use this with Python scripts to automate some otherwise laborious batch processing tasks and connect Magnolia with other systems. There's also a Groovy interface which can do some of this for certain types of task. The Groovy console is a little unloved in terms of support but it's really handy if you know what you're doing.
We have onboarded and trained staff to use the platform really quickly. It's friendly and accessible to newcomers so while we often get scared looks from new staff when we first tell them about it, they come round to love it very quickly once they see it!

Usability

We've shown it to a number of users both clients and our own team and despite initial apprehensions, they "get it" very quickly. It's intuitive and friendly and quick to perform daily tasks. We once had a client tell us "Using Magnolia makes me smile" which says it all for us.

Performance

It's a lean and performant platform. You don't need to put reverse proxy servers in front of it to speed it up (although that does make it go even quicker) as there are various layers of caching built in to the application. While it's a little cryptic, the internal caching system is actually quite configurable and can be tuned to the right sort of content.

Often what tends to surprise many an IT manager is that you can run it on relatively modest hardware. We've often been met with "are you sure ?" but the reality is that it doesn't need a whole lot of horsepower.

Alternatives Considered

Sitecore Experience Commerce, dotCMS, Contentful, Umbraco CMS, WordPress and Drupal

Magnolia is not as costly as other enterprise grade platforms and is easier to deploy, more reliable and less resource hungry. It's often also easier to use and certainly easier to use than it's Open Source counterparts. It also manages content in a much more structured manner than simply throwing a bunch of HTML in a database meaning that it's not trying to shoehorn web content in to non-web endpoints as some of the others do.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Magnolia go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Magnolia again?

Yes

Other Software Used

NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Ahsay Cloud Backup Suite, ZEVE- Virtual Environment

Likelihood to Recommend

Magnolia is very well suited to scenarios where there are multiple end points for content eg. apps, remote devices, websites etc. and with multiple users. Magnolia is very good at working with different "shapes" of content so it's not necessarily all about HTML content for the web which tends to be the default for a number of other products of this nature. This means that it's more logical for people to work with structured data and easier for the applications to sort and manage that content when they receive it.

This works really well when you have multiple team members (often in multiple locations). We've had clients who've had people in twelve European locations with sixteen languages and they can share skills and resources between them but still manage their own content.

Magnolia is less appropriate for SMEs who have fewer digital assets and content. It's not to say that it can't be done but it's more that the budget would not necessarily fit.

Magnolia is still our go to platform for our clients and ourselves

Overall Satisfaction with Magnolia