Who can tell me about his own experience using Magnolia CMS? [closed]

Question

I am looking for some comments on Magnolia CMS. Is there anybody out there having experience on Magnolia and willing to tell about? I am interested in comments like usability, how fast to start with, potential problems, advantages, disadvantages (in comparison to other open source CMS). E.g. I could not find out if Magnolia is able to use MySQL data or not. Reason for my question is we need to build a community platform offering content, wiki, blog, news and user message exchange and all that stuff. I have some experience on Joomla but not on Magnolia. Any hints, comments, critics, warnings, recommendations are welcome! Thank you very much! Alex

BTW: I already found http://cmsmatrix.org/ which is a good starting point to identify features.

Answer 1

You might want to ask this question on the Magnolia user-list where those that work on Magnolia projects will see it.

And yes, Magnolia is able to use pretty much any database as its persistence layer.

Answer 2

From a Java programmer's point of view, Magnolia CMS has a lot going for it. It has a pretty clean, easily extensible architecture. Lots of hooks to plug-in your own functionality, should you desire to do so.

Also, with the "blossom" module it allows for easy Spring MVC integration.

There might be other systems that provide an easier start, have more 3rd-party-modules or a bigger community. But if you are a Java developer looking for a solid base from which to implement you own custom stuff, you should definitely consider Magnolia.

Answer 3

Magnolia has some high server demands, steep learning curve and poor/limited documentation - you won't find many/any 3rd party books either. However, if you persevere with it you can create pretty much anything. It will work with a MySQL DB but you lose a lot of the main benefits of the system if you do not use the JCR DB.