Item: Magnolia
Rating: 8
Author: Davide Dispenza

Overall Satisfaction

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to manage the sites of the customer I work with. We use as a front end application, with a custom module we made. We don't use the authentication module to let the users login, but our secure servlets. the product lets us solve the problem of finding a templating system and a CMS application to not let IT employees change the contents of the web pages.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy to use for end users
You can use both jsp and ftl
It lets you easily develop a site for both mobile and desktop (V5 only)
Nice templating mechanism

Cons

Uninstalling modules it too messy
Almost no documentation
It uses 2 dbs (one on filesystem) and so it is impossibile to get back in case of errors when publishing new version of self made modules

Return on Investment

Faster to publish content updates
Profiling the access at the front end management
Only one point to access the content which is also well organized
Easy to manage once in production

Likelihood to Renew

Next version seems to be largely improved, but managing the update will be challenging. I think that a big company needs a CMS like this for their websites. Also it is always good to have a CMS that gives you also the possibility of managing the publishing for different devices like in V5.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is a great CMS for websites of large companies, but not suited for small companies nor blogs or simple services websites. Not so good for selling sites or intranet sites. Still good for documentation pages, showing images and videos, commercials, informative persistent sites, governative sites and so on.
I think it is still a little bit tough to update from one major version to another due to the lack of documentation.

Comments

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Magnolia CMS, great on his purpose, less on documentation

Software Version

Modules Used