magnolia cms

recently, i’ve checked out magnolia cms. it can be installed and configured very quickly (in about 10 minutes). editing is easy as well. in fact, i’ve never seen any cms with such an ease of use before. sure, it only offers basic features so far (story publishing, simple forms, basic content-management), but my impression of it was a good one. i particularly like its emphasis on standards, notably the upcoming jcr (java content repositories).

so far, i haven’t taken a look at its internals though. i thus can’t comment on code-quality, architecture, documentation etc. yet.

all in all recommendable for anybody who doesn’t need bells and whistles but simple yet flexible, easy content management with an excellent protection of investment (both open-source and built on standards). well suitable for personal, soho and smb use.

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5 Replies to “magnolia cms”

  1. Hmm… I’m currently trying to install the 1.1 version and it is ugly… very ugly. Magnolia may well be advertized as j2ee compliant, but that won’t make it so. It has several core architectural problems: in several places absolute paths are required you cannot have two instances in the same servlet container, ergo you must have two servlet containers for it tu run correctly it requires you set up several System Properties to function.it need to be run on the document root of your webserver

  2. in 10 minuten..? bestimmt nicht. it is ugly… very ugly! ich habe es schon vor einem halben jahr mal versucht und aufgegeben. gestern ging es nicht mir nicht anders. es braucht naemlich eine menge zeit, know-how und nerven. der windows installer ist offensichtilich nicht im stande es automatisch einzurichten und ich finde es schade, dass es nicht eine detailierte (und korrekte) anleitung gibt damit es manuell einigermassen speditiv zu machen waere!

  3. Those that have problems installing Magnolia should use the community maling list and provide feedback that helps improve the project instead of giving false impressions here. Magnolia cannot make Windows a decent environment, but the installer works and has been tested thousands of times. If people that want to run a J2EE CMS have trouble starting a terminal they should use Frontpage to manage their web sites.

  4. Boris,

    I hope you are being facetious when you recommend using Frontpage (for anything whatsoever). The whole point of a content management system is so that end users who aren’t technically savvy, don’t have to use poorly designed tools such as Frontpage, no less using it to manage a Java based site, which I’m not sure how far you would get since it’s not designed for anything even close.

    Magnolia doesn’t “make” a Windows environment, just a Tomcat server with Magnolia more or less preconfigured for those who can’t use Tomcat’s autoinstaller on Windows and then copy and paste or drag the Magnolia .war file into the respective webapps directory.

    It doesn’t get any simpler than this and is almost as simple on Linux distro’s. You won’t find any CMS with any sort of legitimate and serious functionality (including Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, dotCMS, Jahia, etc.) that has such a simple install, unless you are familiar with subversion, or SVN, etc. which I seriously doubt you are after reading your post.

    It’s not Magnolia’s fault you can’t follow instructions or be resourceful enough to do anything other than gripe about free software, (excellent codebase no less) and then suggest using impotent tools such as Frontpage, that cost money and aren’t even designed to do the very thing you complain about.

    If you can’t figure out how to install it, or how to ask for help, then you ought to try some hosted solutions (e.g. WordPress, Drupal, etc.) where you don’t have to worry about the installation and can find more legitimate things to complain about.

    Magnolia is a stellar CMS, possibly the best, but not for amateurs to setup – just use once it is already setup.

  5. Thanks for your comment, Brandon.

    Please note the date of Boris’s post. Things looked a bit different back in late 2004. FrontPage faded-out end of 2006.

    You’re right in that nowadays, people not willing or able to install and setup a CMS solution should probably try one of the hosted solutions.

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