How to integrate Magnolia CMS with Spring app in limited range

Question

I have a question to Magnolia CMS (integrated with Spring) users.

I have to write e-shop integrated with CMS where we can divide all pages into two categories:

1. Edited and added by admin
2. static pages like user account settings, shopping cart etc.

First ones, must be totally customizable by admin - I mean, admin must be able to create his own template, add text areas or graphics/video whenever he wants. He also must be able ( this is very important) to create new products which must be also stored in db to be accessible for the application code ( to fill the products list by myself in the code or to set the prices on the static admin pages).

So user can add as many products as he would like, create separate template for some of them and I have to be able to search for this products in db ( for example when user try to use search criteria). The search panel must be created by me - but where admin will place it is up to him.

The second type of pages are static pages done in JSP and I do not expect to change it using CMS. As the second type of pages is of course not a problem, I do not know what CMS solution I should use for first type of pages. I thought about Magnolia CMS, but as I can see all templates must be created by programmer in the code.

Also I'm not sure if it's possible to implement mechanism to maintain products ( inside the e-shop) - from one hand admin must be able to add templates for them in CMS, but I must be able to access them from the code ( to maintain them at shopping cart, make invoice etc). The product prices are set from admin panel ( static pages) as well- not from CMS of course. Maybe I can add any single product at the static pages ( insert it into the db) and somehow connect CMS page with it ?

I also need to add that main page template must be designed by HTML designer, so perhaps it would be plain HTML and this main template would be updated due to the admin needs in CMS.

Cloud anybody please advice me the best CMS solution where I can achieve all this ?

Best Regards

Answer 1

I've seen fair number of shops implemented that way with Magnolia where you use spring & web flow to manage a shopping cart and checkout process, while letting editors to create & customise products & categories & promos available in the shop. You can also get similar (w/o spring) integration just by installing shop module of Magnolia. It's product and product category management might come in handy even if you were to replace checkout by your own.

To answer the other questions and stipulations

• you can write your templates in ftl and models in groovy and have those hosted inside of the repository, thus giving access to them to editor and allowing her to change whatever needs to be changed. However there is also danger in that since templates are responsible for generating html, editor might be able to break html layout by making changes directly to the templates. While you want editor to create new products and modify existing ones, Magnolia lets you separate template of products from the content of products so you can let editor to edit just all the fields that you deem editable for given product without having her to ever access html or ftl directly.

• as you mention, html will come from designer, so what you pbly want is to take that html, break it into functional blocks that repeat in multiple pages, save it as ftl templates and replace sample text in there with FM tags to retrieve such data from Magnolia. Actually, even better, download the STK static prototype and hand it over to your graphic designer. Tell her to create design by changing css/js/images only, but not to change structure of the html itself in the prototype, then you can truly just drop in css/js/img provided back to you by the designer.

• regarding static pages - you can always serve them from Magnolia even if you don't expect anyone to ever edit them (since it usually happens sooner or later that someone wants to edit them) or you can simply configure bypass for the url for such pages and have Magnolia ignore them so they can be served by underlying application server container

• to bring in Spring based application, you might consider looking in more details at and using Magnolia's Blossom module which will in turn let you annotate your spring controllers to be treated as Magnolia templates to make integration even more simple.

HTH, Jan