Magnolia CMS

I’m developing a website using Magnolia CMS and I’m mighty impressed so far. Firstly, it’s been very easy to get it up and running in the tiny memory constraints that I have imposed upon it; it needs to work on a 512mb virtual machine because I don’t want to pay more for my hosting, and it's a good challenge to try and get a stock product with modern feature to work reliably in a confined space. Secondly it needs full user access rights, and it’s been very simple to configure and test. Finally the stock templates are actually useful and I’ve needed to do the bare minimum of customisation so far.

It's for a personal site, so I’m sure there would be other challenges if I had specific functionality that was needed and a design constraints but as it uses a template system it looks like this is part of it’s internal design to allow massive customisation of the output. It seems to run quickly even though it has virtually no heap space to use, and is stable. Some of the included features are fantastic, such as the ability to do polling import of RSS feeds which will allow me to pull in this blog for example. It also can aggregate the RSS to merge and filter which is very powerful.

The Digital Asset Management features are good too, I can upload an image, tag it, and attribute it with the Creative Commons information for the source so that I can add the links back to the creator. There are neat image gallery tools too which list whole folders of images and display thumbnails with big versions shown using a ‘lightbox’ style when they are clicked on.

My only gripe so far is that when a page is given an image it’s used in different ways; by the page itself, in search results, in teasers, and in carousels. Unfortunately it sometimes scales the image without regard to the aspect ratio thus squashing it. There is an add-on available to do image manipulation but it’s only for the Enterprise Edition and they don’t publish the price of that licence. It’s the only EE feature that I would like so it’s highly unlikely to be worth it. Thankfully it does have the option to override the image in these components which means I have to manually create a new image using a desktop application but that’s not too tricky. It would have been nice to have some basic crop and scale image tools built in, especially as Magnolia is a Java application so there are lots of free open source libraries which can provide some very advanced functionality. 

A link to the new site will follow when it’s launched… soon.

Update on Friday 18 November 2011 at 22:28 by Antony

Boris Kraft (@bkraft) of Magnolia has advised me that as of version 4.5 the community edition will have the imaging component. Huzzah! Thanks Boris!