Talk:Magnolia (CMS)

Notability
Magnolia was referred to in --AlastairIrvine (talk) 10:01, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Conflict of interest
See the note I left at User talk:Bkraft. I'm going to tag this article with suspected COI for now, and later I'll try to clean it up. Dreamyshade (talk) 16:30, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Proposed Revisions for Removal of COI/Advertising tags
This note is with regard to the COI/advertising notice on the article.

At the outset, I would like to note that I am the CTO of Magnolia and therefore closely associated with the CMS project. I would like to begin a conversation with other Wikipedia editors of how to remove the COI/advertising tags on the article page and rewrite the article to comply with Wikipedia guidelines.

Please find below a rewritten version of the page that tries to be as neutral as possible and reflective of Wikipedia best practices. Note that citations are available for most items, and will be added as the text is revised and approved. Your feedback and advice will be appreciated. Thanks for reading this.

Bkraft (talk) 11:51, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Magnolia CMS
Magnolia is an open source content management system (CMS) developed by Magnolia International Ltd. It is written in Java and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is most commonly used to manage and create content for large corporate and business sites.

Project Summary

 * Developer(s):	Magnolia International Ltd


 * Stable release:	4.3 / March 23, 2010; 6 months ago (2010-03-23)


 * Development status:	Active


 * Written in:	Java


 * Operating system:	Cross-platform


 * Type:	Content management framework, Content management system


 * License: Enterprise Edition = MNA, Community Edition = GPL


 * Website:	http://www.magnolia-cms.com

History
Magnolia 1.0 was released on November 15, 2003.

Magnolia 2.0 was released on November 15, 2004.

Magnolia 3.0 was released on November 15, 2006.

Magnolia 4.0 was released in March 2009. It offered a new browser-based administration interface, and a set of production-ready templates, called the Magnolia Standard Templating Kit (STK), for rapid development of Web sites and online applications.

Magnolia 4.1 was released in June 2009. It added support user-generated content templates that provided new functionality, including forums and public user registration. It also included new features like a CMS-wide address book, multiple themes, RSS generation and aggregation

Magnolia 4.2 was released in November 2009. It focused on data handling and interoperability with external data stores. It introduced support for hierarchical data types, WebDAV support for template editing, a new data import module, and updates to Magnolia’s Standard Templating Kit (STK) to address accessibility and SEO issues.

Magnolia 4.3 was released in March 2010 added new features to support multi-site, multi-language and multi-domain scenarios. It also added support for Groovy for custom application integration, and the Magnolia Store, a tool for module management within Magnolia.

Versions
Magnolia CMS is available in three versions: Community Edition, Enterprise Edition Standard and Enterprise Edition Pro. All versions include the same features, but an Enterprise Edition license entitles customers to additional technical support and Service Level Agreements. Enterprise Edition Standard users can use Magnolia CMS only for a single site, while Enterprise Edition Pro users are permitted to use it on an unlimited number of sites and domains.

Technologies
Magnolia CMS is written in the Java programming language, and comes bundled with the Apache Tomcat Application Server. It uses or integrates well with the following open source projects:


 * Apache Tomcat Application Server
 * Apache Jackrabbit
 * FreeMarker
 * EhCache
 * jQuery
 * Spring Framework

WYSIWYG Authoring Interface
Magnolia provides a browser-based, WYSIWYG authoring interface, which allows authors to edit pages "in place" and preview their changes immediately. Each page is considered as a set of pre-defined content areas that can be directly edited and viewed by authors. Changes are displayed in context, allowing authors to immediately see the effect of adding new content. Content areas can also be moved from one location to another using drag-and-drop.

Templating System
Magnolia uses a template-based architecture that allows developers to create and customize pages and sections (paragraphs). Each template can be independently configured and styled with CSS. Each template is also associated with a dialog, which is a Web form that authors can use to add content, upload images, or configure layout. The data entered into the dialog is used to configure the template and render it in a Web browser.

Staging Environment
Magnolia provides a built-in staging environment, which allows content authors to add and modify content in an authoring environment and then publish this content to the live environment once approved. This approach is designed to integrate with standard publishing workflows and promotes content review and verification prior to publication.

Modules
Magnolia is built using a modular architecture. This allows developers to extend the base system by creating a custom module to address a specific requirement or use case. Modules can also be used to package an entire Wen site for easy deployment, complete with all templates and content, or to package and deliver a set of assets such as images or documents.

Internationalization
Magnolia is i18n-compliant. Administrators are able to define single site tree across all languages, thereby ensuring that users in different languages see the same content structure. The system also supports multi-lingual dialogs, and a fallback mechanism for default language selection.

Multi-site Support
Under Magnolia, multi-site installations are supported through domain-based multi-client capabilities. Once a domain has been assigned to a site tree, only that part of the content structure will be shown to editors accessing a Web site that resides at the specified domain. To ensure an integrated browsing experience, URLs will be modified at run-time by Magnolia to always reflect the domain.

Full-text Search and Caching
Magnolia is capable of indexing page content, and providing search form templates that authors can add to page templates. Search form templates and search result pages are customizable with CSS. The system has a built-in disk cache that can be activated for additional performance gains.

SEO, Standards Compliance and Accessibility
Magnolia is capable of generating descriptive URLs for each page. Page markup is compliant with current Web standards for CSS, XHTML and accessibility. Magnolia supports semantic markup for better search indexing.

Modules
There are a number of modules which extend the functionality of the base CMS product. These modules need to be downloaded and installed separately from the Magnolia Store. Some modules are maintained by Magnolia International and others by the community.

Modules are currently available for:


 * Advanced caching and flushing
 * Data backup
 * Data categorization
 * Comment posting and notification
 * Form generation
 * Forum creation
 * Centralized media management
 * User registration
 * RSS aggregation
 * Event scheduling
 * LDAP authentication
 * WebDAV support

Standard Templating Kit
One of the main modules introduced in Magnolia 4.x was the Standard Templating Kit (STK). a set of fully-functional Web page templates. STK templates provide pre-designed Web pages or Web page elements for common use cases. Templates are written in JSP or Freemarker, and therefore can be adapted for custom workflows or integration with third-party tools. The STK currently includes templates for the site index page, section pages, article pages, event listing pages, news stories, FAQ pages, site maps, image galleries and search result pages.

Framework Integration
Magnolia supports integrating Struts 1.1 and Stripes applications through the Struts module and Stripes module. Magnolia’s Blossom module will automatically recognize Spring Framework 2.x and 3.x annotated classes and expose them for use by editors. The Groovy Interactive Shell module enables Groovy scripts to be used inside Magnolia as model classes for Magnolia paragraph templates.

Community
Magnolia has a large community of users and developers, who participate in the project through forums, mailing lists and discussion groups.

The Magnolia Forge is an online repository of community modules for Magnolia CMS. Developers can register their module project in the Forge and get a Subversion repository, Jira instance and Nexus access to manage their module code. Magnolia Forge also hosts Magnolia API Javadoc, a community wiki, mailing lists and user forums.

Community members meet at the Magnolia Conference, a yearly community event held in Basel, Switzerland. This event is attended by Magnolia users, developers and key business partners and focuses on both business and technical issues around Magnolia development and deployment. Magnolia Conference 2010, held in September 2010, had an attendance of 240. Magnolia Conference 2009, held in September 2009, had an attendance of 160.

Awards

 * September 2010: Swiss Open Source Award

Magnolia International Ltd.
Magnolia International Ltd manages the development of Magnolia CMS. It is based in Basel, Switzerland and was founded in by Pascal Mangold and Boris Kraft. It was previously known as Obinary Ltd, and changed its name to Magnolia International Ltd. In September 2006.

Comments
I've collapsed the draft, to make this page easier to navigate, you could move it to a userpage draft if you wish to that it can be edited separately from here. The main problem with the current version and the proposed draft, is that neither have reliable sources which demonstrate why the software is important and should be included, per our notability requirements. First of all, you should find independent sources which discuss the software to show that this guideline is met. The draft is probably worse than the current version in some ways than the current version, because it goes into great detail about the features of the software and releases etc. This makes it look more like an advert than the current one and should probably be greatly reduced. I'm not entirely sure how best to write an article about this if it is notable, but if you ask at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Computing someone might be able to help you sort that out. I'll keep an eye on this page and will provide help RE the COI but as I said, I can't do much more myself. SmartSE (talk) 15:41, 22 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your comments. I reviewed the notability guidelines per your comment. I'm able to find quite a few independent sources that have talked about Magnolia, and these are cited in the original article. These include the Gartner Group (Magic Quadrant), various CMS vendor evaluations, and case studies in reputed online journals covering the CMS industry. Magnolia CMS has also been the subject of various independent tutorials on webreference.com and Developer.com. Since mid 2007, Magnolia has also been covered by the independent CMS Watch report. Recent sources also include this independent Ars Logics report. Would you agree that these independent sources are sufficient to meet the notability guidelines? Bkraft (talk) 04:49, 23 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I think the econtentmag.com and the ARS logica are just about ok as reliable sources. It would be good if there was more coverage in more mainstream publications but maybe you can find some using  (this cuts out any press releases). SmartSE (talk) 17:02, 23 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Many thanks, I'll do as you suggest. We are being covered by many more publications, so I would certainly be able to add to the list of sources. I'll assume from your note that this takes care of satisfying the notability requirement and I should now proceed to get some advice from Wikiproject Computing as to the article structure. Is this understanding correct? Also, with regard to the COI, do you see any violations of the COI guidance in the proposed draft and how should I correct those? Many thanks. Bkraft (talk) 08:15, 24 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Yea I think notability wise it's ok (just). The draft is neutrally written, but if you put it live, I think someone would nominate it for speedy deletion as it doesn't make it clear why Magnolia is significant and it looks slightly spammy. A big part of WP:NPOV is to write an article based on what reliable sources have said about it - at the moment the draft probably involves some of your own personal knowledge (what we call original research) rather than what sources say. If there haven't been many sources talking about it, then the article is likely to be relatively short if it is to remain well written. It's best to leave an in detail description of the program (and when versions have been released etc.) to your own website, rather than including them here. Hopefully someone at Wikiproject Computing can help you as to what should be included. SmartSE (talk) 10:20, 24 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I left a note some weeks ago (Feb 2011) [on the Wikipedia Computing project talk page] asking editors to review the proposed draft and provide feedback. As of today there has been no response. Should I go ahead and publish the draft article as is? Or is there another way you can suggest for me to have the article reviewed by the Computing project? Please let me know as I'm not sure what the next step should be. Many thanks. Bkraft (talk) 03:44, 18 March 2011 (UTC)