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Magnolia CMS in 2011 – another amazing year

2012-01-26T06:39:00.000-08:00

2011 has been another incredible year for Magnolia. From 4 people in 2006 we grew to 28 employees (plus a handful of externals) at the end of 2011. Read on for some insight into what has happened in 2011.

A lot has been achieved last year even though for the first time in our history we did not release a new version of Magnolia. This is surprising on one hand; on the other it shows just how far we have come. Quite a number of maintenance releases have been published. Version 4.4.5 probably set a new record at Magnolia, with fixing nearly 100 issues. And we do have Magnolia 4.5 in the making, which will be released at the end of February 2012 and all things considered is possibly the biggest effort we have ever put into a single release.

Two years ago we set out to change one aspect about Magnolia in particular: its documentation. Our documentation team has grown to three persons. Documentation has been a full blown success. Where 2 years ago we would get bad comments about our lack of documentation, today we get positive feedback up to the level that decisions for Magnolia are made because of the quality of documentation. The statistics do reflect this: in the last 12 months we had a stunning 70% growth in unique visitors to our documentation site. During the same time, our corporate site traffic has grown by 17.5%.

Business has reflected our strong position. Worldwide, the number of license subscriptions has grown by 32% last year. Our expansion efforts in the USA resulted in an astounding 60% growth in license subscriptions for Magnolia Americas, which now holds 20% of our subscriptions worldwide.

Notable Client wins in 2011:

Atlassian, USA
Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF), France
Basler Versicherungen, Schweiz
Bundesrechenzentrum GmbH (BRZ GmbH), Austria
Editora Meio & Mensagem Ltda., Brazil
FOXTEL Channels Group, Australia
Leroy Merlin España S.L.U., Spain
Lufthansa Systems Network Services GmbH, Germany
MBC, Middle East (Dubai)
Michelin Brazil, Brazil
Scientific Learning, USA
Sheffield City Council, UK
Zumba Fitness, USA

(Links added where sites are already live and/or publicly visible). We now hold an astonishing 7% of the worlds global 100 enterprises as our customers, and fully expect this number to grow much higher in the coming years.

Furthermore, in 2011 we have added the following new partners:

Cross Agency
Fast Forward
Priocept
Serviceplan
T8y
Tribal DDB
Ventiv
VML

In terms of Facebook Likes, we have seen 57% growth and have 830 fans today. Our Linkedin group has 241 members, with nearly 70% growth last year.

We held our first two webinars in 2011, wrote 8 new case studies, won a Red Herring Top 100 Europe Award, are a sponsor of the Web Experience Management Interoperability (WEMI) standard at OASIS and added an arabic landing page (www.magnolia-cms.ae). A whopping 64 (prev: 40) blogs entries have been written by Magnolians this year to help spread the word and our support team has solved 554 issues, 62% more than in 2010.

Our biggest goal for 2012 is the release of Magnolia 5. For 3.5 years we have designed and redesigned Magnolia's next UI. Last year we have seen a new phenomenon: iPads take the enterprise by storm. Apple recently stated that 93% of Fortune 500 companies either test or already deploy the iPad. This has made us change our plans for Magnolia's future UI in mid 2011, and by the end of 2011 we finally had the breakthrough in interaction design we have all been waiting for. Magnolia 5 will be the first CMS on the market that has been designed for touch. This is tremendously exciting and will be a watershed event for us.

All our efforts will be focused on not only delivering the product but also to be ready for the opportunities that Magnolia 5 will create for our business. Obviously we will need to grow, and our growth will bring changes. We will ensure that these changes will not happen by accident, and that our growth remains manageable.

Luckily our financial position is excellent. Magnolia has no external obligations. We are independent in every aspect, where most competitors are either part of larger corporation (e.g. Fatwire (Oracle), Day (Adobe)) or have financial dependencies (e.g. venture capital). Others depend on services to finance their product development and in this way compete against their partners. Magnolia on the other hand has a sustainable license model that ensures a steady cash flow without competing against our partners.

We have great plans for 2012, which will be a really busy year for all of us. As you can see from this review, we are in pole position to make 2012 a year to remember. I am looking forward to it.

PS: Join us. You will like it.

Webinar how Elekta choose their new CMS and why Magnolia

2012-01-17T05:35:00.000-08:00

In our series of industry webinars, we put our spotlight on Elekta, a global pioneer in clinical solutions for treating cancer and brain disorders.

The Webinar will focus on how Elekta transitioned from its previously proprietary CMS solution to Magnolia: the steps they took to evaluate various alternatives, the need analysis they performed to match requirements to key CMS capabilities, and the key decision factors behind their choice of Magnolia. Needless to say, this should be very interesting, especially for Website owners and content managers who are considering, or are in the process of evaluating new Web CMS solutions, as it gives in-depth insight into the type of analysis one should perform when choosing a Web CMS.

We have a big lineup on Jan 24 2012: Andrew Rodgers, Manager of Global Web and Multimedia at Elekta, together with Webmasters Tobias Müller and Chris Owen, and will be moderated by Greg Gillespie, Editor-in-Chief at Health Data Management Magazine. You’ll find more information and a registration form for the Webinar on the Magnolia website.

And of course, if you would be interested in presenting a Webinar on how you successfully used Magnolia CMS in a project, we’d be happy to host your Webinar as well - just contact us!

Time to switch your job. Work for Magnolia CMS!

2011-12-06T06:55:00.001-08:00

Since 2006, Magnolia staff has been growing an average 50% per year. That means next year we'll likely hire up to 20 people for our three main locations Miami, Basel (Switzerland) and Kromeriz (Czech Republic). Hop over to our Magnolia CMS jobs section to see the current open position at all three locations.

So why would you want to work for Magnolia? For one thing, it is a truly international experience (it's even in our name: "Magnolia International Ltd."). It is a small but dynamic company that slowly but surely works its way towards its original goal of building the world's best content management system. Our high standards regarding the quality of what we deliver, not only in code but also in documentation and communication, start to be noticed. Today, 7% of the Global 100 Enterprises are Magnolia CMS customers. And we see this number rise.

But beyond our obvious success, and the fact that Magnolia's growth is entirely financed through revenue, you will find that it is a unique culture that drives our success. We are a company that prides itself on its openness. We talk with our customers, with each other, with partners and the wider community about where we are at and where we want to go. We believe our strength is in focus and execution, not in secrecy or sales. With Magnolia, we hire great people and provide opportunity to develop yourself. We love to help you grow to your fullest potential, so if you find that you want to switch from one position to another, we are happy to help you make that transition.

With many other product-oriented companies your main task will be to provide services to clients. At Magnolia, we focus on product development. All projects are done by partners, not Magnolia. And we don't do body-leasing either. So you get to stay in the office and actually know the rest of the staff! Sometimes of course, we'll also send people to help clients with architecture consulting or training, as far away as Australia. So you get an ideal mix of getting out of the office occasionally and still having a sustainable lifestyle. About work-life balance: we don't work on weekends, nor long hours. Good for you, and your family.

On some days (like today), even Santa drops by!

So, time to check out the Magnolia CMS jobs section and apply! Looking forward to hear from you.

Next Magnolia Webinar: How Simply Business doubled their leads using Magnolia

2011-12-03T06:16:00.001-08:00

Just a short note on our next webinar: Magnolia helped SimplyBusiness, the UK's leading insurance broker for small businesses, streamline their content management processes and create a more interactive, SEO and social media friendly Website. That alone might not be worth mentioning, were it not for the fact that they achieved a 135% increase in sales leads from this effort.

I can't promise you you'll be able to do the same just by watching our next webinar, but if you are interested in integrating Web content and online services, improving SEO and social media marketing and optimizing the content management processes, why not spend an hour and hear Jasper Martens, Social Media and Affiliate Manager at Simply Business explain how he achieved such an impressive feat.

This Webinar will take place on Dec 8 2011. You’ll find more information and a registration form for the Webinar on the Magnolia website.

BTW, if you are interested in presenting a Webinar on your successful Magnolia CMS project, let us know!

How U.S. Navy uses the Spring Framework to sign up recruits

2011-11-02T07:17:00.000-07:00

The Magnolia community has known that navy.com is powered by Magnolia (and the Java Spring framework from Springsource) at least since Matt Dertinger of Campbell Ewald has given his talk at the Magnolia Conference 2010. But now we are upping the ante by providing you with a webinar featuring no less than Tobias Mattson, the core developer of Magnolia's Spring integration, together with Sean McMains, Magnolia Sales Engineer, and Matt Dertinger, who works on the various U.S. Navy websites.

The Spring framework is used by many of Magnolia's customers to extend their products and services to the web. Their virtual presence such becomes a portal into their business, allowing website visitors to directly interact with back-end systems like e.g. a booking engine.

The beauty of Blossom (Magnolia's Spring integration technology) is that Spring developers get to work from their point of view. In other words, they pretty much stay within Spring (and Java code) and need to know very little about Magnolia CMS.

I encourage you to join our Springsource webinar and learn how Campbell Ewald has used Magnolia's Blossom module, integrated Spring into Magnolia CMS, and improved the web experience for their visitors. By using Magnolia and Blossom, you can open up your business processes to the web without the pain and overhead of a portal infrastructure, and that prospect alone is certainly worth attending. Enjoy!

Just published: Are industry top level domains attractive?

2011-09-07T05:04:00.000-07:00

Just published: a guest blog post by yours truly on the J.Boye website: "Are industry top level domains attractive?". I am exploring if the CMS industry should get their own top-level domain. Head over!

"Open Source" a differentiator no more

2011-06-29T00:46:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting discussion around a recent blog post by Matt Aslett of the 451 group. (they do churn out great articles, don't they?).

Matt notes that "Open Source" as a differentiator is being dropped by more and more commercial open source projects, and backs it up with some anecdotal evidence. This of course caught my interest, as I have been discussing this topic internally at least for the last two years… and we made the decision to change the communication, and currently work on defining a new tagline (away from "Simple Open Source Content Management").

So yes, the trend is clearly there. Open Source is neither a primary value proposition nor a primary differentiator (anymore, if it ever was). Simply put, just because software is open source doesn't mean it works for you.

You would not differentiate your product as "the closed source alternative to X", would you? So why the other way round?

As a product and business models mature, realities change. When Magnolia CMS started with an "Enterprise Open Source" business model in 2006, this model was in its absolute infancy. It worked for Red Hat, but that was about it. We regularly had to educate prospects about the viability of our business model, not always successfully so. (For those interested, Magnolia CMS has been growing 50% per year since 2006).

Today "vendor-driver Open Source" or "Commercial Open Source" or "Enterprise Open Source" have become mainstream. It has become clear that the oversight, direction and long-term view of a vendor has benefits for an Open-Source project, and for these benefits to materialize, a revenue stream that finances the product is essential. This in turn has lead to companies looking at Open Source no longer as "Free (of cost) Software" but as "Software with a lower TCO and higher flexibility".

Once you realize this change in customer perception, dropping open source as a differentiator or value proposition is only the logical next step.

For Magnolia CMS, this will mean we'll focus more on communicating primary business values to our customers.

Having a strong community to share your knowledge, ideas and gripes, as well as ask for or provide help will make a great difference in how enjoyable your daily work with a product like Magnolia CMS is. And sharing or learning from extensions that others provide certainly is a big part of an Open Source community.

Being able to understand and quickly adapt the code of a product that needs to be integrated and adapted to custom needs as much as a Content Management System does, is incredibly beneficial for any company.

But the fact that Magnolia's source code is open should be the deciding factor only once all other things are equal. In our daily interactions with customers we learned that for them, Magnolia is foremost a great product (and great company), and only then Open Source.

Magnolia CMS, Red Herring Award and entrepreneurship

2011-06-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

When I first came across Red Herring, it must have been the late 90's or early in the new millennium, I thought this is a very interesting magazine. And when I saw companies being listed as a Red Herring 100 winner, I was hoping to one day be amongst them.

Fast forward to 2011, and Magnolia has reached that milestone. Will this change everything? Hardly. Earth will still rotate around the sun (unless you are a creationist, in which case it probably is the other way round); and all the world will not suddenly flock to Magnolia's website to try out our content management system.

But. And here is the "but": when you start out to build a business, you (hopefully) do so with a good reason (why are you doing this?) and dreams (what do you want to achieve?). And while your dream my be to write the best content management system on the planet, there are smaller, more tangible aspirations, which are often inspired by what you see elsewhere. The Red Herring award was such an aspiration, and that is why Magnolia (and myself) have reached another milestone.

For entrepreneurs, hitting such milestones is a confirmation that they are on the right track, that their aspirations can be fulfilled and their dreams eventually become reality.

For future entrepreneurs I hope you have your own dreams and aspirations, no matter how big or small, and that they too may come true for you.

And should the Red Herring Award be one of your aspirations, I encourage you to aim for it. Alex, founder of Red Herring, is certainly an interesting person to meet, modest but with great experience. He likes to give advise and simultaneously tells you that 90% of the advise anybody will give you is not going to help you. And meeting fellow entrepreneurs, people with ideas, ambitions, success or failure under their belt, certainly is a thing to aim for.

So here is one piece of advise you can take or leave: next time there is a Red Herring Award, apply for it. And even if you don't, or don't make it to the finalists, much less the winners, go there. The event is open for technology entrepreneurs, and if you are open to meet like-minded people, to exchange ideas or just learn about what others are up to, the Red Herring event is an excellent venue.

Open Source 2011 Survey sees flexibility as driver

2011-05-18T02:15:00.000-07:00

The Open Source 2011 Survey (answered by 455 participants, 60% non-vendors) has lead to some interesting results.

I would like to highlight the question "what makes open source software (OSS) attractive". Here are the three main drivers that make OSS attractive from a customer's perspective:

Freedom from Vendor lock-in
Lower costs
Flexibility

"lower costs" no longer dominates the list like it has in the past 3 years. This year "freedom from vendor lock-in" is the number one attraction of open-source software. And it is the first time that "flexibility" is in the top three.

For Magnolia that plays right into our value proposition:

no vendor lock in, since our customers have access to the source code, can choose between a large network of implementation partners, and we support open standards so it is easy to move on should you want to (incidentally, our customers prefer to stay with Magnolia once they have experienced the difference great software can make to their business results and staff's happiness)
Lower costs has moved down from the top spot, and it should. Magnolia competes on value, not (licensing) price. Which doesn't mean we don't provide an excellent deal – Magnolia's Standard Templating Kit will significantly reduce your total cost of ownership, and no matter what we charge for Magnolia, the STK benefits alone outweigh the price.
Flexibility – a recent independent analyst report has found Magnolia CMS to be the most flexible CMS system on the market (free download after registration). This is no coincidence. We know that every customer has different needs, and we know that the web is evolving faster than I can type this blog. It is only natural we ensure Magnolia CMS can easily be adapted to every whim of your marketing boss, integrate with every legacy backend that is powered by electricity and incorporate the latest fad printed in glossy magazines typically read by your CEO in trans-atlantic business class flights.

If you want to learn more about the Open Source 2011 Survey results, the 451 group has a report you can download from their website (registration necessary)

The 10 most important features of a CMS

2011-04-18T02:12:00.000-07:00

In a recent blog post entitled "Features Impacting Open Source CMS Selection " we learn that 3,365 people answered the question: “When selecting a CMS, how important are the following features?" as part of the latest Water & Stone report on open source content management systems.

79.7% of the participants in the survey were from small to medium-sized businesses (less than 100 employees, so the answers might not translate directly to Magnolia EE customers who are typically a tad larger (e.g. EADS, Johnson & Johnson, Unilver and the US Navy). Still, there are many Magnolia Community Edition users that fit the bill, and so let's have a look of how Magnolia stacks up on the 10 most important features a CMS should have.

Flexible User Permissions – nearly 70% of respondents think this is very important. So does Magnolia, of course, which not only allows you to create ACL's Groups and Roles but also supports external authorization and authentication via LDAP and NTLM. All content in Magnolia is stored in a JCR-170 repository, which means all content is protected through access control.
Open API – covered: read the Magnolia API.
Search Engine Optimization – Magnolia and especially its best-practise Templating Kit (STK) got this aspect covered extensively, starting from friendly URLs to support for the Sitemap protocol. We even have written a 30-page Magnolia SEO tech brief describing how to apply search engine optimization (SEO) to enterprise websites by employing best practices together with the built-in tools in Magnolia CMS.
Content Tagging – since Magnolia 4.1 we allow you to categorize content using Magnolia's Content Categorization module. Watch the video showing you Magnolia's content categorization (this feature is shown starting at 9:09 minutes). There is also a community modules for tag clouds that takes a different approach.
Configurable Workflow – well covered thanks to our integration of a third-party workflow module. Workflow is documented on our official documentation page. WHile most people get along well wit Magnolia's out-of-the-box 4-eye-workflow, there are nearly no limits to what the underlying engine can do.
Content Versioning – yes, Magnolia CMS creates versions of content and includes a diff view to see the differences between them.
Social Media Integration – provided via Frisbee, a Magnolia module that provides
- Google Map (v3) integration (single and multiple markers)
- Flickr Slideshow, with custom query builder (tags, full-text search, author based search..)
- Facebook integration (SDK, iLike, meta tags, reading values from page properties)
- ShareThis and AddThis integration
- Twitter integration (last tweets, tweet this, retweet)
Multi-Lingual Support – coming from Switzerland, we breathe multi-lingual. For an example, see Sony's Singstar site. Magnolia CMS also allows you to export content into a translation-office friendly XML file to externalize content translation.
Multi-Site Management – read the case study how Texas State University is running 300 sites on Magnolia CMS. Magnolia's best-practise Templating Kit provides multi-site support in the Enterprise Edition.
Mobile Publishing – Magnolia CMS has always been output-format agnostic, and while we currently ship no demo templates to show how content could look differently on mobile devices (a rather trivial exercise), Magnolia's STK demo shows how content is rearranged based on available screen estate (example starts at 5:30). Also, you may be interested to learn that Texas State University has an excellent Magnolia-powered iPhone app for their students; and recently voters in Switzerland very able to view voting results via a Magnolia-powered iPhone app.

Well, this concludes my little roundup of how Magnolia CMS supports the features Water & Stone's asked readers to rate in their survey. I think these are quite interesting, but note that readers had to rate these preselected 10 features, so it could be that some features are even more important (they just weren't on the list).

Magnolia recently won what is very likely the biggest Open Source CMS license deal on the planet. The feature that made the customer decide for Magnolia in the end? The fact that Magnolia didn't crash under high load, unlike the last remaining (closed-source) competitor on their short list.

And what about ease-of-use?

"We chose Magnolia CMS because it is easy to use for both our staff and our users." - Silke Radlherr, Team Leader, SWM

To learn how Magnolia's ease-of-use helped a $7B Utility Build its Brand on the Web, read our case study about SWM.

And to read what our users think about Magnolia, read the testimonials.

Magnolia Conference Call for Papers & registration open

2011-04-14T06:20:00.000-07:00

We have launched the new Magnolia Conference site, and are now accepting proposals for presentations. This is the third time we do the Magnolia Conference and judging the success of the last two, you don't want to miss it. As in the last two years, we'll start with a partner day on Wednesday September 7th, followed by the public part of the conference on 8th & 9th.

This year we'd like to hear more from our ever growing list of successful customer projects, and I fully expect that the business track will be packed with cool stuff and interesting case studies. The technical track will certainly be surprising as well - last year we have seen presentations about Spring integration, Konakart integration, Ruby on Rails integration to name but a few. Also Joonas of Vaadin fame did show you what makes the Vaadin GUI framework so attractive.

Speaking of which, this year's conference will finally see Magnolia 5 and its new Vaadin-powered GUI. This will of course be the biggest reason to join, and I for one look forward to sharing the excitement with you. If you haven't done so already, be sure to check out our Magnolia 5 space on the community wiki, where you can track our ideas and comment on them.

If you care for a glimpse of what the conference is like, check out the 2010 Magnolia Conference archive. JBoss's community Manager Mark Newton calls this

one of the best Java CMS events I've been to

which is a really nice way of saying that you'll enjoy your stay.

If you register before the end of April you pay half the price of registering in September, so if you know you want to come, don't hold back. We also plan to offer developer workshops regarding Magnolia 5, details to follow. Workshops will cost extra, and be limited in availability. As a thank you for you early birds, conference ticket holders will get notified first.

So now, either register or submit a proposal for a presentation - in either case we'll be happy to see you at the Magnolia Conference 2011.

Raising the Bar in CMS Usability with Vaadin

2011-02-09T01:37:00.000-08:00

We want our next major release to provide the very best administration interface for Web-based content management on the market.

Go ahead. Read that again.

Yes, we really do believe Magnolia 5’s GUI will be better than any other web based CMS on the market. That is a strong aspiration, agreed, but then again it’s been Magnolia’s core aim from day one: “Simplicity on an Enterprise Scale” for us means a CMS that is intuitive to use and works well for enterprise use cases. We have shown Magnolia CMS can cover enterprise use cases. Now its time to deliver on the usability part.

Setting a goal means adjusting focus. Magnolia 5’s focus is on user experience.

Magnolia 5’s usability shall amaze content authors with a high-usability interface not just when using a desktop browser, but also on an iPad and other mobile devices with a touch screen. With such high goals, you better choose a very good toolkit for building Magnolia’s new Graphical User Interface (GUI).

At Magnolia Conference 2010, Philipp and Daniel talked about Magnolia 5.0, and specifically about how we were evaluating Vaadin as our framework for the next-gen AdminCentral (our administration interface) in Magnolia 5.0. After a lot of debate (both internally and with the community) and some proof of concept development, we finally decided to stop tinkering and take the decision to go with Vaadin as our toolkit of choice for the Magnolia 5.0 GUI.

Show Me the Veggies!

If you'd like to see the Vaadin/Magnolia synergy in action, take a look at above video. This is a proof of concept. Things will look completely different with the final Magnolia 5.0, but it shows that Vaadin is able to work for the things we have in mind. It also shows a nice idea about building a graphical dialog editor.

Consistent User Experience Across All Input Devices

Magnolia's tagline is "simple open source content management" and we take this to heart. We want content authors (and developers) to be delighted with every aspect of Magnolia. Very simply, Vaadin helps us meet this goal because the people that build Vaadin share our philosophy. They really care about the user interface.

Out of the box, Vaadin comes with some great-looking UI components, which certainly helps for first impressions. And not only that, but it lets you put them together into a slick and intuitive interface without leaving behind a trail of messy code. However, shiny widgets alone don’t make a good user interface. With Andreas, Magnolia has a dedicated and experienced user interaction designer on its team who completely shares our vision of how things should work. Andreas has worked for months defining basic interaction patterns and hammering out how an interface must work to support not only mouse but also keyboard and touch as input devices for common Magnolia operations. So the next time you hit the down arrow on your keyboard to navigate down through the AdminCentral tree, it will actually work!

Touch support means Magnolia’s administration interface will work on an iPad and other mobile devices requiring touch support. It also means that Magnolia 5’s AdminCentral will likely be completely accessible, a feature often requested by governments but hardly found in any existing CMS.

One benefit of how we will utilize Vaadin, using shared components and pure Java packaging, is that the overall user interface will be much more consistent, regardless of whether a module comes from Magnolia's core developers or from an external contributor. This means shorter learning curves and more shiny, happy users.

Standardization and High Security

If you’re a Magnolia developer, you probably already know that our current AdminCentral client is tightly coupled to server-side architecture, and we use a custom JavaScript library to handle AJAX requests in the client. We never set out to conquer the world with our GUI libraries, but back when we started, there was no alternative to writing our own. With Magnolia 5.0 we finally have the chance to switch to an existing, established, well-proven, documented and (externally!) maintained library instead of having to work with our own. This allows us to focus on stronger traits, like building great user interfaces instead of fixing browser incompatibilities in GUI widgets. And it allows everybody else to use a library they can use across many other projects.

Standardization is a good thing and Magnolia has used existing code and supported standards wherever there was a match with our needs. The GUI library really is the last major part of Magnolia that was non-standard, simply because what we need did not yet exist.

Besides using a standard GUI library, one of our original technical goals for Magnolia 5.0 were to decouple AdminCentral from the server. Alas, our research made it clear that still no GUI framework exists today that fulfills all requirements at once. Vaadin comes with built-in listeners and data binding for its UI components, and it's already tested to work on major browsers, so it covers a lot of what we need. The framework is server-side, which brings a lot of benefits for every developer working with it, but it also means the coupling between client and server is not quite as loose as we originally envisioned it. Still, there is a lot to like about it:

Rich widget framework
Out-of-the-box theming
Java developer friendly
- Close to Swing
- GWT based (Java -> Javascript)
- Can integrate any GWT-components
- Rare GWT-compiles (compared to plain GWT)
Testing with pure JUnit
Apache License
Well documented

As Philipp discussed some time ago, Vaadin uses server-side events, which could impact performance, an issue that is particularly critical if you wish to provide a snappy user interface on the web. While we've seen that a server-side framework in itself doesn’t imply worse performance than a pure GWT approach (an alternative we considered), we will need to invest more effort on that end to achieve what we want. On the positive side, running an entirely server-side architecture makes the system more secure, and Vaadin's JSON-based UIDL allows for future extensibility. Vaadin is helping us kill multiple birds with one stone here: we're reducing server load, increasing security, future-proofing our work and creating a better user experience at the same time.

Open Source and Community Support

Like Magnolia, Vaadin is an open source project, and it already has a strong community base, excellent documentation and a dedicated team of developers who are improving it on a daily basis. Vaadin UI components are all written in Java and so, if you know Java, you can extend them, share them with the Magnolia community, and build cool stuff on top of them. That is one major reason we like it: with Vaadin, you don’t have to be a JavaScript wizard to build great applications for the web browser. And let’s face it, if you were, you’d be working for them.

For those of us who like to be home at least occasionally, Java is a fantastic choice to build applications, and Magnolia 5 with Vaadin will make it easier than ever to build extensions for Magnolia and help the Magnolia community grow, because now, you can also go wild on the front-end.

The best GUI Tool for Our Needs

We've been trying out Vaadin about eight months ago and while many challenges have been overcome for the original proof of concept, the real work still lies ahead of us. In our review and testing, we found that Vaadin consistently scored at or near the top in criteria such as productivity, security, theming, collaboration and community backing. With Magnolia 5 GUI development starting in earnest, we’ll soon have much more to say in terms of real-world experience. Ultimately, there is no silver bullet. Just like when you have to choose a Content Management System.

Learn More about Vaadin and Magnolia 5.0

If you’d like to learn more about Magnolia 5.0, you can see presentations about our Magnolia 5.0 roadmap from the community day at Magnolia Conference 2010. Then, check out the Magnolia 5.0 wiki pages. Learn more about Vaadin in this presentation by Joonas Lehtinen, also from Magnolia Conference 2010.

Day to be acquired by Adobe - implications?

2010-07-28T04:30:00.000-07:00

Today, Adobe announced to buy Day Software, another WCM manufacturer based in Basel, Switzerland, who uses the same technology foundation as Magnolia. As an initiator of the JCR standard and main contributor to Jackrabbit (the JCR reference implementation), Day is certainly important for the JCR ecosystem.

Let's have a look at the possible implications of the deal for Magnolia.

Adobe bought Omniture not even a year ago for 1.2B$, which was/is the leader in web analytics. With Day's CQ (their CMS), Adobe now has the final part in their portfolio to create, analyze and publish content. (I couldn't find out yet what part "Adobe Publish" plays. Seems to be an SaaS platform, so probably not competing with CQ.)

With Adobe, Day can now enter the US market, something that was difficult until now (even if they are no longer Day). Adobe buying Day further validates the JSR-170 standard, makes Magnolia's technology stack better known and more attractive for potential buyers. Interest in Magnolia will rise along.

Adobe might well underplay the repository part and the visibility of JCR might decline in turn. We typically do not sell Magnolia because of JCR (although it does happen), and once we have a prospect, saying that he gets the same repository technology he would buy from Adobe will certainly be soothing any worries. Good for Magnolia again.

On the technology side, Adobe will either strengthen JCR and keep Day's CTO and JCR brainchild David Nüscheler, or David will leave to pursue his vision regarding repository technology elsewhere. David will get a lot of $ out of the deal, so he will have little reason to work in a direction he doesn't like if the alternative is to spend the rest of his life on his own island watching whales make love in sunset.

In either case, it should not mean too much worry for repository implementations. Even if Day under its new owner stops contributing to Jackrabbit, JBoss just launched ModeShape (tested extensively using the best test app they could get - Magnolia CMS). Good thing Magnolia is independent of the underlying repository implementation.

The business aspects

Adobe is building huge integrated application suites and I bet that CQ will not become cheaper by being part of that. On the contrary, Adobe aims to provide value through an integrated publishing chain for the customer (creation, analytics, publishing) and will monetize that value.

Adobe buying Day brings insecurity to the current Day prospects (and clients) and will result in more prospects leaning towards Magnolia. In addition, many people don't want to talk to the likes of Adobe because they rightly fear that Adobe will sell them every product in their portfolio, even if all they ask for is a WCM.

The market will split between those seeking an expensive integrated application suite (Adobe Livecycle) and those seeking a powerful and focussed WCM product that is easy to use, extend and integrate with their business needs (Magnolia CMS).

Summary

Adobe buying Day will be good for Magnolia and Magnolia customers; it will most likely not be good for Day customers (the aim of a takeover rarely correlates with the goals of the existing customer base, otherwise the existing customers would have bought something else). Thanks to Adobe buying Day, Magnolia's technology stack will gain more credibility, and with clients like the US Navy (navy.com), EADS.com, Sony Playstation and many other multi-nationals in its portfolio, it is easy to see that Magnolia CMS is a very credible alternative to becoming dependent on a single integrated product suite delivered by a rather closed-sourced billion $ company.

Using Magnolia's inplace-templating for hot-fixes

2010-04-27T05:37:00.000-07:00

I just realized that we forgot to provide a mechanism for the Google-Site-verification meta-tag when we migrated our corporate homepage to Magnolia 4.2 two months ago. For those not acquainted with the subject-matter: this is a way to prove to some third-party service you actually own the site (as in "have the right to modify content"). There are various ways to do so, but the fastest and least intrusive is to add a meta-tag to your html-head section like so:

<meta name="google-site-verification"
content="eGPInzT6lx6Kff8Hb2T3SCvUmnjVWeBg76G_y7PXxBk">

Now, in previous versions of Magnolia that would mean I have to grab a developer, explain what I need and hope she finds time for my request within her tight schedule. Even if she wouldn't be overly busy, starting up a development environment (IDE), checking out the project sources, adding the needed functionality, testing, and then deploying to a live instance (which more likely than not involves someone from operations, too) would be a matter of least an hour, but more likely a week would go by before you see the change in production – plus it is definitely not worth the effort for such a small and single change.

So, after this somewhat long introduction to the issue at hand, Magnolia has a solution that is simple enough for me to use. It is the "inplace-templating" module, which we install by default with Magnolia STK (but STK is independent). It simply allows to edit Freemarker templates directly in the browser, and then enable and activate them.

Here are the simple steps:

1. find the main template in the Templating Kit menu:

2. Open the editor and add the missing meta-data field

3. Check enable template (see above screenshot)

4. Activate the template

Done.

You can check the site's html source to see the change:

So not only is it really trivial to adapt your templates on the fly (BTW, you can also map the templates repository to your filesystem via WebDAV and use your favorite text-editor to change the templates); the real benefit is that you can use this mechanism to do urgent hot-fixes without involvement of anybody else.

Once things work as expected, simply notify your developer and she will roll the hot-fix into the next regular release. This way, nothing gets lost, and the whole process is highly efficient.

Magnolia's Standard Templating Kit reduces project risk

2010-04-20T05:27:00.000-07:00

Today, basic web content management functionality has become a commodity readily available in a thousand shades. Where does Magnolia CMS provide value not available elsewhere? It depends on your specific use-case. To some people, Magnolia's usability is key. Others need Magnolia's flexibility, the ability to easily integrate and adapt to any business requirements or Magnolia's outstanding scalability.

However, no matter what your use-case is, to provide value, your website will typically be custom-built on top of what any "commodity CMS" provides. And it is here that Magnolia CMS provides unique benefits not found anywhere else, as you'll see in a minute.

With version 4, Magnolia CMS has introduced a ton of functionality for the front-end (publishing side) of content management. The "Standard Templating Kit" is a powerful framework to create your own custom sites. It provides:

core logic to make custom templating easier and more powerful than ever before
support for accessibility, SEO, multi-site and multi-language content
about 50 production-ready content types ("paragraphs")
nearly 20 production-ready page templates based on typical use cases (e.g. home page, section, article, event, news etc.)
a configuration framework that allows you to extend, replace or customize any aspect of STK

To showcase its functionality, a complete production-quality website is provided as an example that can be easily adapted to your needs and provides an excellent starting point to define your requirements.

As should be clear from the above list, the STK provides significant value in itself. Consider the following graph. It compares the functionality provided by a demo site, a kick-start-kit or Magnolia's Standard Templating Kit (STK):

We know that the STK provides you with a significant head start, because so much of what you need is already provided. The next graph shows the effort remaining to build your custom website given the previous examples:

Compared to other options, the Standard Templating Kit significantly reduces the effort to build your custom website. Less effort generally means you will be faster, but more importantly, it means your project will be much more predictable. You have less unknowns. And for project managers, "unknowns" means project risk.

This is why ultimately, Magnolia's Standard Templating Kit greatly reduces the likelihood of a CMS project failure.

To learn more, head over to the Magnolia CMS website, read about STK features or watch the videos highlighting Magnolia functionality.

Growing the Community with the Magnolia Store

2010-03-08T06:27:00.000-08:00

One of our goals for 2010 is to grow the Magnolia community significantly. We aim to do this on various levels, e.g.:

by providing better infrastructure
adding new communication channels,
improve the product
…and making what has been achieved more visible

The following new development definitely relates to last point in the list.

With 4.3 Magnolia CMS will sport yet another new feature – the Magnolia Store. The store will allow Magnolia users to check which modules are installed locally, download newer versions of these, download additional modules and view what is happening in the larger Magnolia community. Below is a first wireframe.

One of the reasons we want to provide this feature directly in AdminCentral is that today, the information which modules are available is maintained in too many places – at Magnolia itself, we list modules on the wiki as well as in the official documentation site. It would also be nice to have that info on the corporate site. Then some of the info is stored directly inside the module descriptors. Finally, contributors typically maintain that info on their own websites as well.

The results is a duplication of effort, maintenance hell, and most importantly it is difficult for users to find out about available modules. Today, the store looks as follows:

The Magnolia Store has been developed together with OpenMind (as you can see, the community is already hard at work) and will initially be hosted and maintained by Magnolia. It is implemented using Magnolia CMS. One of the ideas is that anybody who submits modules for the store will be able to get an RSS feed that allows him to to embed only his contributions on his own site.

Being server-side, we will be able to extend and modify the store's contents even after it is released. It will also allow us to track which modules are most interesting and add features like rating or commenting. Most of all, it should make the available modules more visible and motivate community members to contribute existing Magnolia modules.

Besides showing available modules, the store will also act as yet another communication channel, this time directly with the community. We will use it to announce available training sessions, new blog posts or anything else that the community might be interested in.

Eventually we will also directly support commercial usage of the store; for instance to sell modules or training. Right now, our main goal is to show you which modules are already available and provide a platform for our community to show their custom Magnolia extensions.

We are looking forward to see you join in and add your contributions!

Oracle, Sun & Java

2010-02-16T03:36:00.000-08:00

Magnolia CMS is running on the Java platform. According to Wikipedia:

Java refers to a number of proprietary computer software products and specifications from Sun Microsystems, a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation, that together provide a system for developing application software and deploying it in a cross-platform environment. Java is used in a wide variety of computing platforms from embedded devices and mobile phones on the low end, to enterprise servers and supercomputers on the high end. Java is used in mobile phones, Web servers and enterprise applications…

Now that the deal between Oracle and Sun is through, it is interesting to see what this deal could mean for Java, and in turn for Magnolia CMS. As stated above, Java is used anywhere, but most interesting for us it is used on enterprise servers and for enterprise applications. Now, if anybody on the planet can claim to be "enterprise", it's got to be Oracle. It is a safe bet that Oracle will be very interested to keep Java healthy, for various reasons:

many of Oracles enterprise applications are written in Java
many of Oracles customers run server software written in Java

In the last couple of years there was a lot of discussion about Open Source Java. Whatever the outcome there, as much as Oracle means enterprise, Oracle means proprietary. It is unlikely that Oracle turns into a major driver of Open-Source Java or Open-Source in general. That might be regrettable, but doesn't mean anything worse than Java has been under SUN, which until recently was not interested in Open-Source Java either.

Unlike SUN, Oracle makes heaps of money and can afford to drive Java further to increase its value chain and fend off the likes of Microsoft, who with their own proprietary .net platform are the only real alternative for the enterprise business Oracle is interested in.

What it means for anything Java that is non-enterprise is anyones guess, but that is of little concern for us, as Magnolia is running on a server.

So (enterprise) Java will be stronger with Oracle, and I for one am happy that a solid and strong company like Oracle is brewing our Java now.

Groovy.times{Magnolia}

2010-02-03T05:57:00.000-08:00

Forbes has published an interesting article about CTO's favorite choices of programming languages. Its author Dan Woods argues that Groovy combines the best of Lisp, Ruby and Python, but in addition:

"From an operations perspective, Groovy is deployed like Java, so data center staff that can handle Java won't be surprised by Groovy."

Dan ends his article with the words

"… if you are starting from scratch on an advanced Web site, it will be hard to do better than Groovy"

Of course, we at Magnolia CMS could not agree more. Magnolia is written in Java and provides a fantastic framework to build web sites efficiently.

However, developing and deploying apps in an enterprise environment like the Java platform involves a certain effort. Typically, a developer uses an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) in which code is written, compiled, deployed to a test server and tested. This cycle is well defined and has massive benefits in the Enterprise world.

Now as Joe Walker rightly notes:

"There's a fairly obvious link between developer productivity and the edit/compile/test cycle. One of the big things wrong with Enterprise Java is that you swap the edit/compile/test cycle for an edit/compile/deploy/test cycle and one of the things right about PHP is that edit/compile/test is just edit/test."

When you quickly wish to try out something new, build a prototype or add a feature for a demo, a more agile framework would be considerably more fun for the developer, could save a lot of time and lead to a better result. More agile means that the edit-compile-deploy-test cycle needs to be simplified.

Enter full Groovy support in Magnolia. With the next release (4.3, out in March) we will introduce full-blown support for Groovy, which allows for a much more agile approach to implementing new functionality for your web site, while retaining the full power, scalability and security of the java-stack.

With Groovy you can add new functionality at runtime without a edit-compile-deploy-test cycle. The edit-compile-deploy-test cycle is reduced to edit-test like in PHP. This really cuts down on the time it needs to try out some stuff, build ad-hoc functionality or prototypes/demos. It will also be extremely helpful when building import scripts or run reports.

View Greg's video of what we have achieved with Groovy support in Magnolia so far.

Getting serious

2010-02-02T08:13:00.000-08:00

Magnolia today announced the appointment of Andrew King as the new Head of Business Development for Magnolia Americas. Andrew is coming to us from competing Alfresco, and as such he brings with him excellent industry knowledge, and he gets Open Source. Combining his expertise with the outstanding product that Magnolia CMS really is leads to excellent motivation on all sides, and we look forward to make many more customers happy than we already did.

I am really excited about Magnolia making headway into the US. After all, I personally founded Magnolia Americas in summer 2007 and spend considerably time there laying the foundation of our success. With Andrew, we hired a "native" who understands the US market and has worked with European companies before. This will be of great benefit for our clients as well as our partner channel in the USA. Developing the latter is Andrew's first priority, in line with our corporate strategy of growing with our partners. Our non-compete partner strategy should be a strong incentive for potential partners in the USA, and we look forward to partner with some excellent companies in the USA.

Having Andrew on board is certainly a milestone for our US business. Expect more good news to come!

ModeShape - a unified content bus for Magnolia?

2010-01-27T03:10:00.000-08:00

While Oracle is working on delivering everything you might ever need from a single vendor, the real world is a mess. Always has been, always will be. (Reminder: politics has to do with people, not technology).

The real world means that you have a lot of information hubs (call them silo's if they are proprietary and provide no open API to access their content). Content Management Systems like Magnolia CMS have provided a very open architecture to access these hubs, in part because Magnolia is running on the Java platform, which has been built for such integration, and in part because Magnolia's design is so open. However, each such integration still means the developer needs to understand the target API, a fact that quickly becomes expensive.

Wouldn't it be much nicer if the developer could just ignore the fact how and where data is coming from, and simply use JSR-170 to access it?

Enter ModeShape:

ModeShape (formerly "JBoss DNA") is a JCR implementation that provides access to content stored in many different kinds of systems. A ModeShape repository isn't yet another silo of isolated information, but rather it's a JCR view of the information you already have in your environment: files systems, databases, other repositories, services, applications, etc.

To your applications, ModeShape looks and behaves like a regular JCR repository. Using the standard JCR API, applications can search, navigate, version, and listen for changes in the content. But under the covers, ModeShape gets its content by federating multiple back-end systems (like databases, services, other repositories, etc.), allowing those systems to continue "owning" the information while ensuring the unified repository stays up-to-date and in sync.

So, if all goes well, ModeShape will provide a seamless extension of our existing content repository architecture. Instead of e.g. creating a new workspace and importing data from a third party system, you could just use ModeShape and add a connector to said system. If you are lucky, such a connector already exists. ModeShape is LGPL and as such I hope that it will gain wide adoption as a transparent wrapper for JackRabbit. Used in this way (provided the performance hit is small), nothing changes from the perspective of Magnolia (or the developer) but eventually, it will simplify content integration on the JSR-170 level, something that would definitely be a boost to the importance of the specification.

And with some luck, the world will be less messy even for those that don't shell out for Larry's vision of one provider for all things IT.

Happy Old Year, Happy New Year for Magnolia CMS

2009-12-31T08:46:00.000-08:00

We are happy to say that 2009 has been the best year ever in Magnolia's corporate history. We are entering 2010 in a very strong position. We have a great team, a great product, great customers and our financial position is strong. Our license revenue has increased more than 60% for the third year in a row and has now reached about 75% of total revenue, clearly in line with our strategy to leave services to our partners and focus on product development, sales, marketing and education.

On the documentation front, the realization that documentation is as important as the product has resulted in significant more investment into documentation. While unfortunately, some of it has not yet left a visible trace, documentation has significantly improved in many areas. Most importantly, we have just added a full-time technical writer to our team and fully expect our vision for the documentation become a reality in 2010 (some pretty exciting ideas - stay tuned!)

In addition, 2 more new positions will be filled in January, making Magnolia bigger and stronger than ever. So expect great things form us in 2010 - and we expect great things from you! We have seen growing community activity, many cool modules have been developed and the Magnolia Conference was a personal highlight in my life. Thank you for your continued support!

So Happy New Year to all of you. We are looking forward to a fantastic 2010 together with you!

Magnolia Conference Keynote

2009-09-30T12:41:00.001-07:00

Click to Play

Dynamic Redirects

2009-08-11T07:48:00.001-07:00

Have you been in the situation where you want to shorten URL's in your communication? For instance, it is time for a new Magnolia newsletter, the 8th one in our series. Our newsletters are located at http://www.magnolia-cms.com/home/news/newsletters/newsletter-8.html - not exactly brilliant from a communications perspective.

Magnolia allows you to add VirtualURIRedirects, and I have written about their usefulness before in the context of site restructuring.

For our newsletter, we typically add an entry in the configuration like this:

In other words, we add a static entry that forwards www.magnolia-cms.com/nl8 to our newsletter location deep within the site hierarchy, and makes it much easier to send out links or twitter about it.

So far so good, but today saw the 8th time I needed to add such an entry; and what is worse, I realized that we forgot the redirect for our 7th newsletter (which was sent out while I was on holidays, and the person doing the job did not know he had to add it).

Time to dig a little deeper into Magnolia, and avoid future work and worries!

Since sometime in Magnolia 3, you can use regular expressions in the VirtualURIMapping configuration. Here is what you need to do

copy an existing configuration
instead of the default class (aptly named "DefaultVirtualURIMapping") use the class RegexpVirtualURIMapping
define your match ("fromURI"), in our case "/nl([0-9]+)$" which means any URI starting with /nl followed by digits and nothing more (the $ means end of line). The parenthesis denote the dynamic part, which we need to determine the correct destination in the last step:
define your target ("toURI"), in our case the newsletter page deep within the hierarchy, with an added twist: we dynamically add our match to the page name, i.e. "newsletter-$1.html". In this case $1 means replace "$1" with whatever was matched in step 3 between the parenthesis. (And yes, you can have more than one set of parenthesis and reference the matches with $1, $2 etc).

The resulting entry should look as follows, and all you need to do now is activate your configuration and enjoy!

As you can imagine, this is also great for search-engine optimized landing pages.

2009 NBVP Future of Open Source results

2009-03-27T01:55:00.000-07:00

The North Bridge Venture Partners 2009 Future of Open Source survey results have been published.

Fascinating for me is slide 13, which shows how the decision criteria for open source have changed from 2008 to 2009. Number one is lower TCO (unchanged). Access to code, which was #2 last year, has dropped to 5th rank in 2009. Now, "Superior Security" is ranked second, up from 7th place in 2008. Third rank is unchanged "Freedom from vendor lock-in" and new this year is 4th rank: "Better quality software".

So open source software is perceived as cheaper, better and more secure than proprietary alternatives. Sounds like a pretty good position to be in for any Open Source vendor.

2009 NBVP Future of Open Source results

View more presentations from bhouse.

The CMS Vendor meme - a.k.a. CMS vendor reality check

2009-03-17T08:36:00.000-07:00

We have been challenged by Day to participate in the CMS Vendor Meme. To repeat:

The rules

A CMS vendor is challenged to honestly answer all items on the "Reality checklist for vendors" suggested by CMSWatch's Kas Thomas (aka the "we-get-it checklist for vendors").
If possible the vendor has supply screenshots, links or other means to make it easy to verify the answers.
The answers also need to be supplied in a short form of one to three stars (denoting "no", "sort-of", "yes").
Answering all questions on his blog allows the vendor tag some other WCMS vendors.
A tagged vendor should provide a link back to the blog that tagged him.

So here we go:
1. Our software comes with an installer program - Yes

Yes, download the EE trial and you can choose between various bundles meeting your needs, including an installer. All files are installed in a single folder, no additional software except Java is needed. To uninstall either use the uninstaller installed by the installer, or simply remove the folder.

2. Installing or uninstalling our software does not require a reboot of your machine - Yes

No restart required. Why are you asking?

3. You can choose your locale and language at install time, and never have to see English again after that - Yes

You can chose the installer language, but the default locale when you start up Magnolia is English. You can change that in the user preferences for each user separately, so if you have a globally distributed team speaking 15 different languages, no sweat.

4. Eval versions of the latest edition(s) of our software are always available for download from the company website - Yes

Not only eval versions, but even completely functional versions are available from Magnolia - a free trial of a complete Enterprise Edition or a completely free Open-Source Community Edition is available for immediate download.

5. Our WCM software comes with a fully templated "sample web site" and sample workflows, which work out-of-the-box - Yes

Oh yes. And not only is it a sample site, it is a a production-ready, search-engine-optimized, accessible site that works on any browser. CSS driven. XHTML. State of the art.

6. We ship a tutorial - Yes

We provide all documentation online, including a 300 page user manual. No registration required.

7. You can raise a support issue via a button, link, or menu command in our administrative interface - Yes

Yep, link to our issue-tracker is right in AdminCentral.

8. All help files and documentation for the product are laid down as part of the install - Sort of

All Magnolia documentation is online. Link is right in AdminCentral (see above). As a side-note, I don't think it is a great idea to deliver documentation directly with the product, because it bloats the download and is outdated before it is read.

9. We run our entire company website using the latest version of our own WCMproducts - Sort of

Nearly. Unlike Day, we did not have three years time to release our latest generation of software, and since we just released Magnolia 4.0 last week, I am afraid we did not have time to upgrade our site yet. We'll do it as soon as we have managed to call back all those prospects that inquire about us these days.

10. Our salespeople understand how our products work- Yes

Salespeople? That's a bit last century, no? But the people you talk to know how Magnolia works, because the people you talk to are the people who developed it.

11. Our software does what we say it does - Yes

Of course. We tend to say less and let the software speak for itself though.

12. We don't charge extra for our SDK - Yes

Of course not. We don't even charge for the software unless you want our supported Enterprise Edition.

13. Our licensing model is simple enough for a 5-year-old to understand - Yes

You can get one version for free. You get a better, supported version for 12k $ per server per year. Simple enough for a five year old.

14. We have one price sheet for all customers - Yes

Yes, and Magnolia prices are published on the web. We do give discounts to non-profits and educational clients, though.

15. Our top executives are on Skype, Twitter, or some similar channel, and: Feel free to contact them directly at any time - Yes

CEO Pascal Mangold: Twitter
CTO Boris Kraft: Twitter
... and we are always happy to talk to you on the phone or in person.

And we are tagging:

Jahia, Alfresco, OpenCMS, Hippo, EZ, Core Media, dotCMS

Magnolia CMS 4.0 Screencast

2009-03-10T08:27:00.001-07:00

Click to Play

With Magnolia CMS 4.0, managing the layout of one or multiple Web sites has become as simple and yet as sophisticated as managing content. Designers and programmers have full control over the look&feel of content input and output interfaces within the front- as well as back-end through the browser-based administration interface. They can quickly build custom Web site designs on top of the Magnolia Standard Templating Kit which provides production-ready templates.

Do you ever buy bottled water?

2009-03-03T01:16:00.000-08:00

Mark de Visser recently posted about Open Source pricing, asking "Is there a formula for what open source software should cost?".

I don't think there is - or should be - a formula for what Open Source software should cost compared to proprietary software. Foremost, there is rarely an exact proprietary equivalent to an Open-Source offering. Even if there was, the product itself is only part of what you buy. And even within the proprietary world, prices often vary widely for similar products. (Did you ever buy bottled water?)

But I agree that pricing should be straightforward and transparent in general. At Magnolia we originally tried per-user pricing but it quickly turned out to be too complicated, too many questions asked ("what exactly counts as a user"). We have had a per server pricing for the last 2.5 years and we have always published our prices on the web, easy to locate. This way, we minimize our effort, which is a big part of what Open-Source distribution is all about. We focus on the product, not on sales.

Now, this cost reduction can either be propagated to our clients through lower prices or through better software. I don't think the purchase price should be the first reason why you should look at Open Source. If you pay 1000 USD for a car that can only turn left, would you consider that a good deal? Thought so. So the real driver should be value, and the value proposition of Open Source is rather different from the value proposition of closed-source, proprietary software.

The real value of Open-Source is in the its openness, which for true Open-Source products goes far beyond source code availability. Some ideas:

If your IT team is working with an Open-Source product, they will have more interesting and more satisfying work to do and they will learn things that are actually useful for many years to come, as Open-Source products tend to be based on standards. The result is not only cost savings down the road (because your in-house-team can and wants to do more themselves), but also a generally better implementation because you have a motivated team close to the client. Finally, your IT staff turnover is reduced, which further improves your ROI.

So if you pay 20% or 120% for Open-Source compared to a proprietary product has little to do with the value you get. In fact, I would argue that Open-Source provides more value, which is exactly why Magnolia is Open-Source software.

Personalization in Magnolia for the Van Lanschot web site

2009-02-26T04:50:00.000-08:00

(by guest author Edgar Vonk, software architect at Amsterdam-based full service internet agency Info.nl)

As described in the case study on the Magnolia web site Info.nl has recently created a new corporate and marketing web site for Van Lanschot Bankiers, the oldest independent bank in The Netherlands.

In this blog post we will shed some light on the technical realization of the personalization functionality that is part of this (Dutch) web site. The post will not cover details on the concept behind this functionality nor aspects concerning privacy.

The concept is based on Info.nl's model of Virtual Warmth where an online dialogue is sought with the potential client (prospect). The prospect can enter some details on his (or her) financial situation. The web site then displays topics (often concerning financial products) that are related to the prospect's situation. Also, any topics that are visited by the prospect during the active session are tracked and stored as part of the prospect's session. This way a 'personal file' is created on the fly:

Magnolia Enterprise

Info.nl has chosen Magnolia as its open source Java CMS of choice, which has resulted in Info.nl being a Magnolia implementation partner. In this case Magnolia Enterprise was chosen because of the extra features, guarantees and support that come with this edition. Info.nl deemed Magnolia Enterprise a good choice for the Van Lanschot case because of the openness of the product, the reliance on open standards, the extensibility (by means of custom modules) and the intuitive user interface.

Tracking visited topics

The visitor (prospect) is always anonymous. No personal data is stored by the system; hence there is no authentication mechanism. For each prospect a HTTP session is created in which the personal file is stored. Each time a topic is visited the ID (a JCR UUID) of this topic is stored in the personal file in 'last seen' order. Care is taken that topics are not stored twice. This online dialogue is implemented as a single-page-interface using AJAX technology. To realize this functionality a custom Magnolia Filter was written that was set to intercept all topic 'pages' using a virtual URI mapping. The screenshot below shows the filter in the Magnolia filter chain:

In our JSP templates the personal file data is then read from the HTTP session in order to show the list of topics visited by the prospect.

Storage and retrieval of the personal file

The prospect can also choose to save his personal file for later use. The prospect then receives an e-mail with a unique (machine-generated) link back to the stored personal file. The persistent storage of the file is implemented in a Magnolia Page (the Controller in the MVC pattern):

Using a virtual URI mapping this Page is activated upon a storage request. The visited topics are stored in the form of a comma separated list of unique IDs (taken from the current HTTP session of the prospect).

Retrieval of the personal file is done using the unique link that was sent in the e-mail. The associated page retrieves the corresponding personal file from the database and places this data in the current HTTP session. The web site then shows an overview page where the visitor can quickly navigate to any topics that were visited in his previous session.

During this process no sensitive data is stored that could be traced back to the visitor. The stored personal file does not contain any details about the visitor; the e-mail address and name of the prospect are not stored outside of the session.

User generated data and Magnolia

The hosting infrastructure consists of one Magnolia authoring and two Magnolia public instances. We thought about storing the personal files in the JCR repository (Jackrabbit) but decided on a simple custom database in the end. The reason why we chose this option is that using the JCR it would have been tricky to make sure that this 'user generated content' would be available to both public instances as well as to the authoring instance. A separate database that is shared by all three instances was easy to implement. I would be interested to hear from readers if they feel that JCR storage could have been a good option too, using Jackrabbit clustering as a way to synchronize this data across the Magnolia instances.

Result

Magnolia has turned out to be a good CMS for the realization of the new Van Lanschot Bankiers web site. Extending the product with custom functionality part of which was described in this blog post turned out to be relatively easy. This is due to the low learning curve of Magnolia, the openness and extensibility of the product and the reliance on open standards. And thanks to the intuitive interface of Magnolia the content editors of Van Lanschot have no problem in maintaining this dynamic web site.

Magnolia 4.0: Supersonic Templating

2008-12-11T08:37:00.000-08:00

I am happy to tell you that we just hit our 5th anniversary, and times at Magnolia are truly exciting. We have had a phenomenal year 2008, and we have every reason to believe that 2009 will be even more successful for us – not despite, but because of the economic downturn.

Right now, everyone is trying to cut costs, and Open-Source has an excellent value proposition. Magnolia has reached a level of maturity that is probably well beyond many of our future client's existing infrastructure. Magnolia's list of clients is extensive and leaves no doubt that Magnolia can be used in many different and demanding settings. Any way you look at it, Magnolia could not be in a better position. I have written about many factors coming together in favor of Open-Source business in general and Magnolia in particular in my blog entry titled "The Perfect Storm".

So at Magnolia, we are happy, but not complacent. We like what we do, and we work hard to improve Magnolia. Our recent work has been on two fronts - the first one is Magnolia On Air, which we have launched to great acclaim at Gilbane last week. We will talk about Magnolia On Air at length in the coming weeks.

The other front is Magnolia 4.0, in which we introduce what I like to call "Supersonic Templating" – because you can create custom, feature-rich, and pixel-perfect websites faster than you can fly from Paris to New York.

A short intermission about templates in Magnolia

Templates are used to generate output from Magnolia-managed content. Magnolia allows you to tie together an interface to manage data with a publication mechanism. A template provides the smarts to publish anything. Typically, publication is to the web as HTML, but templates can also be used to publish to other channels and other formats – PDF or RSS are two other common formats that come to mind in the context of web content management.

So while templates typically define the look & feel of a web-site, they also provide functionality. For instance, a template can be used to pull data from a third system (e.g. the "content" stored in Magnolia could be the connection and query information to an external database. The template would then use that information to query the database and render the output).

As you can see, templating is quite fundamental to Magnolia. Hence, it only makes sense to further improve the way you define templates and to provide examples of what can be done with Magnolia.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So what is Supersonic Templating?

First and foremost we have added fully-fledged Freemarker support to write templates. Freemarker is a templating language that provides many benefits over JSP (which we'll always and fully support). For instance, it has no dependency on the servlet API. This allows as to do many things we could not (or not easily) do with JSP's. For a start, Freemarker allows us to store templates in the repository. This handily allows us to put templates under version and access control, activate them and use workflow on templates.

The fact that Freemarker doesn't depend on Java means that you can write templates without knowing any Java at all. Freemarker simplifies the templates considerably. Jan has shown a typical example where the new Freemarker template is one-third of the size of our previous JSP template. It makes it easy to distinguish HTML markup from Freemarker code. The new Freemarker support will make it extremely easy for newcomers to get started with Magnolia and allow veterans to reduce their maintenance effort significantly.

There are many other benefits templating in Freemarker brings to Magnolia, which is why we believe it will be the templating language of choice for many new Magnolia sites.

Introducing the Standard Templating Kit

In addition, Magnolia 4.0 introduces a "Standard Templating Kit" (STK). Unlike our previously shipped "Sample Module", this is a complete, out-of-the-box website that can and should be used in production. It provides "templating best practice" and an extensive set of ready-made functionality that can easily be extended without changing the STK templates themselves. This is achieved through a new concept of configurable templates.

The STK renders accessible and 100% CSS-driven HTML. The STK templates and other resources (CSS, JavaScript) are stored in the repository. To allow access to these resources for Magnolia newcomers, we have added a module called "In-Place templating" which makes the Freemarker templates available through a simple web interface. This allows anybody to quickly see how things are done and perform simple changes on the templates themselves right in the browser.

Even better, we are working on providing WebDAV access to the template repository (probably in 4.1), which allows you to simply map a drive to the Magnolia template repository and use standard client html editors to edit the templates and the css. In other words, it gets very very sweet.

We are fully aware that in complex integration environments, templates will be part of a custom module, under SVN version control, built using maven or other build tools and deployed using the Magnolia packager module. But I believe that these new, easy-access templating mechanisms will bring many new users to the Magnolia platform and increase Magnolia's visibility in the CMS space.

New form module

Magnolia 4.0 also provides a new form module that adds new form fields, validation and form processors (e.g. to store the form data in a database). Form fields now have assignable keys that can be used to retrieve values, for instance to send customized confirmation mails using the new Mail module.

New mail module

The new Mail module allows you to send any Magnolia page as inline-HTML and to use Freemarker in mail templates. This makes it very easy to provide news-letter-style functionality.

Other goodies

Along the way we have added other goodies – we make various objects available to templating in JSP and Freemarker. This includes the current content, a model, paragraph and template definition object. Configurable paragraphs allow you to hide complexity that you previously added to user-facing content-editing dialogs. In other words, Magnolia will be even more user friendly because anything that doen't have to be in a user-dialog can be put somewhere else.

Sites

We also introduce the explicit notion of a "Site". You can configure multiple sites and assign a configuration to a content tree. Not only does this significantly improve support for multi-site installations, it also makes it simple to switch the layout of a site with the click of a button.

Final words

As you can see, Magnolia 4.0 will have a lot to offer. Most of the above features have already been implemented in the first preview version, available for download here.

Standard preview disclaimer: the preview is buggy and things *will* change or might not make it into the final product at all.

Before we release 4.0 at the end of January 2009, we will add more templates and define the final packaging. Later in 2009 we plan to provide more support for Web 2.0 / community functionality, add the WebDAV support mentioned above and start implementing GenUIne, the new Magnolia 5.0 architecture. As you can see, we will be busy.

Magnolia On Air reactions

2008-12-09T07:12:00.000-08:00

We have launched Magnolia On Air, our new broadcast content management system, at Gilbane last week. The reaction has been extremely positive. We were mentioned at Gilbane during a presentation by Forrester as a showcase for Open Source systems that provide Digital Asset Management. I have given various interviews, which was a great experience. We have had some serious interest from TV stations and a very large international non-profit organization.

One of the interviews was with Eileen Mullan of EContent, who has published her article about Magnolia On Air.

CMSWire has written a great article: "the real television (even with the benefits of OnDemand and TiVo) is struggling to keep its little antennae above water. But Magnolia On Air, the new Broadcast Content Management system from Magnolia, may be just what it needs to stay afloat".

Magnolia On Air is a collaboration between Magnolia and Futurelab, who brings extensive technological and vertical business knowhow to the solution. Right now we have finalized the first project for RTSI, the Swiss Italian Radio & TV Channel, who will replace their existing site with OnAir in spring. This means we have a fully working system, many components of which are tried and proven. The value of OnAir is in the combination and integration of the components and the marketing focus on the broadcasting industry.

I am sure we will be able to publish more details once RTSI goes live with OnAir, but it is already clear that the new power Magnolia On Air provides for the multi-media division of a broadcaster will speed up time to publish massively and reduce costs to do so significantly.

This is the first collaboration that results in significant value-add to our open-source platform Magnolia. We have received interest for many more such collaborations and it is well possible that this will be a major business driver in the coming years.

The perfect storm

2008-11-21T10:57:00.000-08:00

Magnolia has been available as a java-based, free, simple-to-use Open-Source Content Management System for five years this month. We are in an amazing position right now - Magnolia is a great brand, a great and stable product, we have built a great team, we have an amazing client list, we are seriously cash-flow positive while most of our competition is either burning venture or making losses and we have two amazing products in the pipeline. We are in a position of strength in a massively overcrowded marketplace that will see many competitors vanish in the very near future.

And while the markets tumble and companies struggle to stay alive, there is a very real possibility that Magnolia will fit the bill for those companies that need to update their web infrastructure. Not only is it cheaper (or free if you choose the GPL'd variant), it is also following a completely different philosophy: Magnolia's focus from the beginning was ease-of-use.

Let's face it, the demands of knowledge workers have changed dramatically. IBM still tries to use a database driven web model as the basis for their web site deployments (and in doing so, cripples Magnolia in its projects to a text editor). How much longer will they get away with this in a world where anyone can sign up for free to create blogs like this one, or complete websites without involving a battalion of consultants?

Some wake up to this new reality. Today, if I read press announcements of our competitors, they read what we announced 5 years ago. "Easy for administrators, developers and users". "Joy-of-use". "Simplicity". Yes, but a press release is no substitute for the real thing, which is why these companies directly drive their clients and prospects to us.

Yes, requirements in a multinational corporation can be massively complex, but that doesn't mean you need to torture users with your outdated content management processes or unusable user interfaces. It means you have to take usability serious.

In today's climate, many of our competitors will be unable to sustain their outdated business model which is based on promises and good relations. The number of competitor's senior sales representatives applying for a job at Magnolia has reached a level of one per week. But guess what: our clients don't need senior sales representatives. They visit our website, download Magnolia, talk to our evaluation team to understand how they can make Magnolia fit their needs and if they are satisfied with the result, they become our clients with a simple email or fax message stating the number of licenses they wish to obtain. Did you see the need for a sales guy in this process? Neither did I. So "no sales" is the motto of the day.

Since Magnolia has minimized the cost of sales, it can invest more in development (hence our ability to innovate through tough times) and it can invest more in marketing. The next step our closed-source competition will do is cut down on marketing expenses. This directly enables us to reach a higher visibility with less marketing effort.

So the closed-source competition is loosing money, losing senior sales guys, (have to) maintain an old code base to somehow keep their clients happy (and increasingly fail to do so), and has to minimize their cost of operations (you don't believe that any of these companies will invest into anything in these times) to stop losses. Thus, they go down the death spiral ever faster.

Having dismissed Open-Source as an unmaintainable business model, they failed to seize the opportunity of building more with less. Now they lay off excellent developers (*). Thanks again.

For us, this is the perfect storm.

Magnolia joined OASIS as Sponsor for CMIS

2008-11-10T11:27:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about CMIS and stated that it sounds pretty interesting. Interesting enough in fact that Magnolia decided to become a full-blown "Sponsor"-level member of OASIS so that we can actively participate in this work. This is the first time Magnolia has joined a standards-body. Sameer and I were part of today's inauguration meeting which saw more than 30 people participate in a conference call to form the TC (technical committee). If you have a look at the roster, it is interesting to see Magnolia on the same page (physically, not metaphorically) as EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Open Text, SAP or SUN. I am very excited that we have the resources and talent to join such an interesting initiative and I am confident that Magnolia's numerous large scale clients will benefit greatly form our involvement. Obviously, this is a long term goal as it will take a couple of years before large corporations will ship, and even longer before large corporations will implement what vendors have shipped; but in any case we'll be ready when you are.

TOC for a Magnolia book

2008-11-07T06:58:00.000-08:00

Every once and again someone is interested to write a Magnolia book. Up to now, publishers have not been awfully interested for the simple reason that Magnolia is not a mass market system like some of the PHP based systems are.

Here is a table of contents for such a book from a recent endeavor by Balaji and Ganesh. I think that is a good start!

New blogpost by Vivian about Magnolia's future architecture

2008-10-22T03:32:00.000-07:00

Vivian has written another excellent article about our work on GenUIne, the future GUI architecture of Magnolia. (BTW, I love Vivian's scribbles)

Vivian explains that the main motivation of GenUIne is ease-of-development. Obviously this has no immediate benefit for the end-user. After all, the end user or buyer of Magnolia doesn't know how hard or easy it is to provide her with an easy-to-use product like Magnolia.

However, the benefits will be apparent very soon. First, it will keep my team and our partners happy (because they enjoy working with Magnolia even more) and it will make it easier to add great new functionality faster - for everybody. This includes ourselves, our partners, any shop selling Magnolia-based projects and the people at our client's IT department. So the benefit will be quite visible soon enough for sure.

GenUIne will also sport a gorgeous new interface for AdminCentral – as a side effect; or proof-of-concept you might say. And that will definitely please our end users the day we release it.

JBoss.org switches to Magnolia Enterprise Edition

2008-10-22T00:31:00.000-07:00

Today we launched our first-ever PR campaign. And what news! JBoss.org, the community site for the JBoss open-source community, is about to replace their existing infrastructure with Magnolia Enterprise Edition. More than 40 open-source projects will benefit from Magnolia's legendary ease-of-use and powerful flexibility, amongst them open-source brands like Hibernate and Seam.

Right now, the project is still in development, but we expect this to go live within the next 4 weeks. It has been great to work with Mark Newton, Community Lead of JBoss.org, who luckily is based in Zug, about 1hr away from us in Basel.

Read more about the JBoss.org switch to Magnolia, including a cool case study video, at www.magnolia-cms.com/jboss

magnolia.info back in our hands

2008-10-20T09:33:00.000-07:00

A very quick note: since a couple of minutes ago, our nameservers are back in business for magnolia.info. This was a massively quick transfer back to us. Within the next 24 hours most of you should find us under magnolia.info again. Since we already changed all of our infrastructure, we will stay with the new domain, which most people like better anyways, but it will give us the chance to keep our good Google ranking. More about all of this when I have more time.

Losing magnolia.info

2008-10-15T14:58:00.000-07:00

Right now, we do no longer own the domain magnolia.info. Since we did not expect this to happen, it means you cannot reach us on the web or via email any longer. You will land at a dummy website. Since all of our business depends on us being found, this is not really funny.

The whole story can be put in rather simple words: when we bought the domain a couple of years ago, it was registered with a a registrar that made it hard for us to move the domain anywhere else, so we simply kept it there instead of moving it to network solutions, where most of our domains are registered. Now, we found out the hard way that the original registrar is part of an elaborate network set up by a squatter, see: http://www.rootfest.net/squatters.html.

So, while every decent registrar will try to contact you if your domain expires, this has not happened in our case (well, our registered email address was outdated and we could not be reached there any longer, but we did have valid information for the phone and fax). If a decent registrar can't reach you, he will park the domain for 2 weeks and you will see a message like "this domain has not been paid for" or similar. In any case, it should be straightforward to get it back. Not so in our case. The domain has been transferred today without us ever having received a notice. The new owner is Belize Domain WHOIS Service Ltd. who owns about 150k-170k domains. AFAIK ICANN requires that a domain is not transferred without the current owner giving its ok, so the fact that this has been transferred within 30 days after the domain expired is rather striking.

We have sent the new owner of magnolia.info, who is not reachable via phone, an ultimatum and an offer to get back the domain by tomorrow morning 9 AM CET.

Should we not get the domain back, we will relaunch our complete infrastructure on magnolia-cms.com. We will start working on that at 9 AM CET tomorrow, hence the ultimatum. Once we start the work, we will not look back. Since we own all of our infrastructure and know how to do these things, we'll be spending the next couple of days in our server room and make it happen. We will also contact everybody that links to us and ask them to rewrite their links.

So for anyone wanting to contact us, we'll be back tomorrow on the new domain magnolia-cms.com.

And we'll have some great news to share next Wednesday. So whereever you will reach us by then, we'll be celebrating.

Plus think of the positive side: no more spam.

Published interview on InitMarketing.TV

2008-10-14T01:43:00.000-07:00

Sandro recently shot a video interview with me discussing Open Source marketing and Magnolia. His recent blog entry provides links to the video in full length and as an excerpt of highlights (see below) as well as the full transcript.

Even though I was rather jet-lagged, doing the interview was a fun exercise. I can now see why politicians use scripted answers ;-)

Here are the highlights of the interview:

CMIS is great for Magnolia

2008-09-12T13:12:00.000-07:00

CMIS ( Content Management Interoperability Services) has been proposed by some industry heavyweights (Microsoft, IBM and EMC) as a new standard to exchange information between CM systems.

Lars has written an excellent roundup of what has happened this week with the announcement of a new acronym in the Content Management world.

Just as Lars, I was amazed about some of the reactions. If you believe the hype, JSR-170 is dead and CMIS has cured cancer and AIDS in a single stroke of genius.

Let me look beyond the hype and ask the simple questions "what is in it for me"? The outlook for Magnolia and other open-source or "smaller" (i.e. less pricey) systems is only improved by the ability to access the fat cat's information silos. Systems like Magnolia will bring agility, ease-of-use and cost-effectiveness to developing "non-strategic" applications against large vendors infrastructure, which somehow sounds more attractive for us than it does for Documentum et al. In any case, if it really happens and really works, it is good for the customer, who finally would get a choice. I for one have reason to look forward to that.

Use Magnolia and Google Webmaster Tools to restructure your website

2008-07-11T09:52:00.000-07:00

I am in the process of relaunching magnolia.info. We have rewritten most of the content and changed much of the site structure; in addition the top-level "en" directory has been dropped since all content is in English anyways for the time being. In other words, not a single URL of the previous site would still work on the new site.

How many broken links will this change result in? If you do it right, none.

Here is what I did:

1. Register for Google Webmaster Tools.
If you already have an account with Google, just add the Tools here: https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount, otherwise register first.

2. Verify your site
Add your site to the Webmaster tools. To make sure that you have the right to do anything with a website, Google will request that a proof. The easiest way is to use the option where you create a new page with a special name, like "google14b6bc12345b6e7d.html". This is trivial with Magnolia, simply copy the name, log into our AdminCentral, click "create page, paste the name and activate the page. Back at Google Webmaster tools, click "verify now" and you are done.

~~You can delete the page after that.~~ If you delete the verification page, Google will notice and request a new verification. So you will need to keep it. To make that fact less annoying, you can do a URIredirect (as described below), so the page doesn't show up in your AdminCentral tree. Another option is to log into the public site instead of the author and create the page there; you will probably forget about it but should it ever be deleted you can always create a new one.

3. Now check which – and how many – pages point to you

Check the section "Pages with external links". This will give you a list of links to your site, and tell you ho many people link to that page. This makes it easy for you to understand which pages are most important. I focused on any page that has more than 10 links pointing to it.

Now you know which are the important pages. But what to do about it? Enter Magnolia's "virtualURIMapping". This functionality allows you to map prett much anything to anything else. I will only use pretty basic stuff, but you can even use regular expressions in your redirect config.

4. Magnolia's virtualURIMapping
In our case, we have created a custom module that holds the extensions we needed for the new magnolia.info site, and I will add the virtualURIMapping configuration there. You will find an example in the module "adminInterface", but virtualURIMapping's can be declared in any module configuration. (Note: at the moment, creating a new virtualURIMapping folder will not be automatically detected, so you need to restart your instance. Once it is there, you can add mappings to your heart's content without restarting).

Now. all you need to do is add a mapping for each of the "important" previously available URL's as shown in Google Webmaster "Pages with external links". Typically you will want to copy an existing node (example above: the 3-6 node) and paste it instead of creating the entries manually. This is a fast and straightforward process. Right-click on a contentNode, select "copy" from Magnolia's context menu, and left-click on the parent folder to paste a copy into the folder.

Then copy the path from Googles "external links" page and redirect or forward it to the new location. In the end, this will look similar to our setup:

In the image above you see three different ways to use the mapping:

you can "forward" or "redirect". Forward is server-side and can be thought of as a virtually mirrored page, in other words, the client will not know that /3-6.html is really /home/3-6.html
You can map anything below a folder like I did for "/en/* ". The "*" is the wildcard here, matching anything.
You can map a specific page, like I did for "/en/about-magnolia.html". Note that here the formURI includes the ".html" ending. This also means that e.g. "/en/about-magnolia.print" will not be redirected by this mapping.

There are many more options for Magnolia's virtualURIMapping, but this has shown some of the most often used. You can see it in action once we launch the 3.6 site, scheduled for Monday 21. Just try http://www.magnolia.info/en/products/enterprise-edition.html and see where it takes you!

Jan about the new Magnolia caching API and strategies

2008-06-28T13:24:00.000-07:00

Jan has written another great article, this time about the new cache strategies being introduced in Magnolia 3.6. Up to now Magnolia has simply flushed the cache whenever any piece of content was activated to a public site. As you can imagine, this is very safe but expensive. It is hard to know which piece of content affects which part of rendered output, since pages can dynamically retrieve content from the repositories. This is why the safest way is to simply flush all cache whenever anything is activated. This is expensive, because more often than not, most pages will not have changed.

The new cache API allows to plug in your own cache strategies. Developing custom cache implementations is something we have been doing for quite while as part of our tuning services for our Magnolia Enterprise Clients. With Magnolia 3.6, we make this easier and provide some smarter alternatives to "total flush on activation". It should be interesting to see, what ideas pop up in the near future (we already have more than we can release with 3.6), but smart caching is a pretty interesting topic, especially for those larger clients of ours that run hundreds of sites, very large sites, high traffic sites or multiple language sites. Each one of these has different requirements regarding caching, and by implementing a custom cache strategy, resources and response times can be optimized at the same time.

Enjoy the new improved caching power of Magnolia!

Magnolia on Twitter

2008-06-28T13:23:00.001-07:00

I have started to twit news about Magnolia on twitter - follow magnolia_cms at twitter.com/magnolia_cms

Transactional activation coming to a Magnolia near you

2008-06-05T11:55:00.000-07:00

Jan, our hard-core Magnolia developer, has joined the Magnolia blogging initiative, and does so with an outstanding article about the upcoming transactional activation for Magnolia, which we will release as part of Magnolia 3.6 later this month. In short words, this makes sure that what you publish actually is published and doesn't get lost on the way.

Enjoy!

Slides for JavaSIG NY available

2008-06-03T05:18:00.000-07:00

I have published my slides for the JavaSIG talk I gave in New York. Enjoy.

| View | Upload your own

Magnolia 3.5.8 released

2008-05-30T09:29:00.000-07:00

Today we released Magnolia 3.5.8 Community and Enterprise Edition. The last official release was 3.5.4 back in February. Why the 3.5.8 and not 3.5.5? Our release process will tag a release in SVN (our version control system) when we build the release; and things can still go wrong after that.

Magnolia, when you download it, is a "bundle"; quite a number of modules will be bundled together into the various Magnolia bundles we provide. These bundles include the Community Edition and Enterprise Edition in various configurations, for instance we have specific bundles for Weblogic or Websphere that differ from a standard Magnolia Community Edition bundle.

Each of the 25 modules that make up Magnolia CE and EE has its own release cycle and its own release numbering (see jira, which list the modules we work on). The crucial part is that the actual release depends on the "Magnolia" module, i.e. the version number of that module is also the version number of our release. This is somewhat natural, since this is the "core" of Magnolia.

So whenever we tag the "Magnolia" module for a potential release, the release number goes up, and when we have finalized and released a build successfully, the final release number might look as if we skipped a number of releases. As you now know, we did not.

Presenting at JavaSIG in New York

2008-05-17T07:30:00.000-07:00

I will give a presentation next Wednesday for the New York JavaSIG, thanks to an invitation by Frank Greco, its founder. Also, Emil Ong of Gaucho will be presenting their Resin application server. The event takes place at the Google Engineering Offices, 76 Ninth Avenue (between 15th/16th St), 4th Floor in New York. Cool. That's right around the corner from where I live; I can walk there.

Abstract

Provided you have no product development experience, an unproven business model and no funding, would you set out to enter an already overcrowded marketplace?

Magnolia is the story of four people who did; and almost failed; and almost failed again; and succeeded in the end, because they truly believe in one thing:

Simplicity matters.

You will learn how our focus on simplicity makes Magnolia so attractive for our clients, for developers and for ourselves, and you will gain first insights into how we develop "Genuine", the new GUI for Magnolia 4.0.

Along the way, you will learn how a small team out of Switzerland was able to create a product that is used around the world, is loved by its users and developers, and supports a solid 100% growth rate with an open source business model; and how you can, too.

Opening up: concepts, backlog and roadmap now available on the wiki

2008-05-14T10:21:00.000-07:00

More good news from Magnolia: we have just made our internal documentation available on the Magnolia Development wiki (where you also find Gregs blogs).

We have added the sections Backlog (containing info about which features and functionality we have internally discussed and voted on), Roadmap (obvious) and most importantly Concepts - a section exploring and explaining various concepts related to the coming Magnolia releases.

The 3.6 release will focus on Backup, Caching and Transactional Activation, and you will find the information interesting because the functionality is part of 3.6.

However, I expect a somewhat bigger impact from "Genuine", our research into the future GUI for Magnolia. Of course, the fact that this info is now open doesn't mean it will happen, or happen any time soon. It just means this is stuff we think about, and would love to do.

Enjoy!

Greg joins the Magnolia blogging initiative

2008-05-14T10:15:00.000-07:00

Hey, we are on a roll! Greg just started blogging his thoughts about Magnolia on our confluence installation. Feel free to join us.

Launching all blogs

2008-05-09T02:46:00.000-07:00

We at Magnolia are in the process of launching a team blogging initiative. Philipp and I will start blogging more about what is happening here at the core of Magnolia, what we are working on and what we think about. This is of course Sandro's idea, but it takes some evangelizing from my side to get my team to spend time on blogging instead of coding...

We'll add a blog aggregation later on the Magnolia dev section. For now, enjoy Philipp's first blog post.

Web Content Mavens: Open Source Web CMS

2008-02-19T11:36:00.000-08:00

I nearly forgot to mention that I am on a panel about Open Souce CMS in Washington, DC next week: Web Content Mavens: Open Source Web CMS. It is on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 7:00 PM at R.F.D. Washington, 810 7th St. NW, Washington , DC 20001

You can sign up at the meetup site.

The discussion will be moderated by Scott Mendenhall and will feature the following panelists:

Keith Casey from Casey Software on Drupal
Antonio Chagoury from Inspector IT on DotNetNuke
Scott Davis from Alfresco on Alfresco WCM
Boris Kraft from Magnolia on Magnolia
Joe LeBlanc on Joomla!
Martin Ringlein from nclud on WordPress and TextPattern

I am looking forward to that evening. The last time I have been in Washington, DC was for the Innovation and Transformation conference, nearyl two years ago (see my blog post: Open Source forces enterprise transformation: think value or die).

See you there!

Content Here publishes "Open Source Web Content Management in Java" report

2008-02-13T01:28:00.000-08:00

Seth has finished the first version of his "Open Source Web Content Management in Java" report, which covers the seven leading Open Source Java Content Management systems: Magnolia, and ... six others whose names I can't remember.

OK, OK, the report covers Alfresco, Apache Lenya, Daisy CMS, Hippo CMS, Jahia, Magnolia, and OpenCms, and as such is pretty comprehensive.

It includes:

strategies for evaluating different types of open source projects
how to consider open source in conjunction with commercial options
insights into the project communities, their histories and their outlooks
a rating system for comparing/contrasting the open source WCM options

The report gives a pretty solid introduction into Magnolia as a product, project and the community aspects and is definitely worth the 800$ price tag if you think about aquiring a new CMS, no matter if open source or not. Get it here: http://www.contenthere.net/reports/jwcm.html

The idea of a content assembly line is so American

2008-02-07T06:49:00.000-08:00

In "Content Managers: Extract the Full Benefits of Structured Authoring", Eric Kuhnen describes how he imagines DITA can be used to create technical manuals in a manufacturing fashion, much like building anything today by finding the smallest possible part, then getting the best deal for its production, and finally reassembling the parts to a whole.

When facing objections of content authors, Eric counters with "Business, though, is about fielding the best team, and there is no arguing that the level of control, accountability, and efficiency found in a structure-authoring assembly line would improve dramatically even as the unit costs to produce technical documentation would drop and the scalability would increase."

This whole issue is so American to me. I have spent a lot of time in the US lately, and one of the things that struck me most is the fact that anything gets broken down to the smallest bits, and optimized out of context. If I call Citibank because I have a question, I need to answer a number of security questions to establish my authentity. I then get redirected to another department, where I have to answer the same set of questions. Recently, that has happened 5 times in a row, sending me once around the globe, from Indian call centers to US bank counters to wherever.

This is such a bad experience for me, the "user", "client" or "reader". Yes, maybe each part is efficient and cheap, but what remains is worthless.

I have found this pattern everywhere in the US. I walk under a bridge in Manhattan and I am amazed about the monstreous ugliness of the sewer system installed under the bridge. Surely, the developers of that bridge did not care how the bridge looks from below. All they wanted is the cheapest guy to provide the sewer system. But as a pedestrian, I do care how my surroundings look.

Things in the US simply do not fit together. Anywhere you look, the smallest parts maybe efficient but in their completeness, they are inefficient, unfriendly, unusable or simply do not work at all.

Now back to Eric's article. I have written a lot of content, and I have read much much more. Maybe you argue a technical manual is not a Purlitzer Prize winner. OK. But splitting things into tasks that are individually assigned to the person best suited (he talks about hiring people that are good at writing captions!) does not make the result a team effort that works. If someone writes only captions without knowing what the picture's intention is (something that only the author of the actual content knows) will at best result in description of what I see on the picture (a.k.a. "the Microsoft Help Page Syndrom"). I doubt the result is efficient. It will simply be unusable. Not to mention the fact that I cannot imagine anybody being proud of her job, but that is a fundamental issue again found in the US - as a friend recently noted "The difference between European and American craftsmanship is that Europeans are proud of what they produce".

And, I might add, if you are proud of what you do, you like to do it. If you like to do it, you are better, more efficient and healthier. But of course these are no factors you would look at if you just want to outsource writing 1000 captions.

PS: Maybe Eric finds the time one day to research how Volvo builds cars. Hint: not the way anybody else does.

Better than free

2008-02-06T14:15:00.000-08:00

If copying something is free, and the internet is a giant copy machine, what is valuable if not the thing (like software, music, images or information) being copied? Kevin Kelly in Better than free lays out eight ideas by asking "Well, what can't be copied?":

Immediacy
Personalization
Interpretation
Authenticity
Accessibility
Embodiment
Patronage
Findability

Of course this is extremely interesting for Magnolia, a business on the forefront of the "free" economy.

From my experience, I would add:

Responsibility

This is not the same as Authenticity. Maybe it fits in the Embodyment category. We embody the free software called Magnolia. But probably it really is something else, and can be sold. Magnolia is responsible for the free software, which is why we can charge for the Enterprise Edition even though the mere fact of making it available (the copy) is essentially free. Following the above ideas, we know why we can in fact give away the Community Edition (CE) for free. Think:

Immediacy: we could make Magnolia CE non-immediate by not providing a download (compile yourself). In a sense we make it non-immediate by not providing support, meaning if you need support, you need to get the Enterprise Edition first.
Personalization: we don't personalize the free CE for you. We do with the EE. And this goes a long way, for instance, we certify your platform, i.e. we garantee that Magnolia works and will work in the foreseeable future on your platform. No way we do this for the free CE.
Interpretation: we could restrict access to documentation to EE users. We do restrict access to us (as interpreters called "support") to EE users.
Authenticity: we provide access to authentic bug fixes and the authentic compiled and certified Magnolia Enterprise Edition. You just know it is not some malware you download.
Accessibility: we provide access to the EE, any version. You do not need to keep copies around. We could go further and back up your customizations for you, or even your data.
Embodiment: we come to your place to talk and to work with you if you pay for EE. We essentially don't talk to you if you are not a EE client.
Patronage: you can pay for the CE if you wish (only one person ever did, that was a 5 dollar donation 4 years ago).
Findability: being able to charge for the EE allows us to make Magnolia findable in the first place - through branding, public relations, marketing and even advertisement.

What is non-content data?

2008-01-31T08:53:00.000-08:00

Recenty I have been asked:

"Does Magnolia require a separate database for non-content data?"

Well, what is non-content? In the philosophy of JSR-170 "everything is content".

Technically, everything is accessed through the JSR-170 API, which is very well specified and the documentation is well written. The API is implemented by various implementations (well), Jackrabbit, CRX, Oracle 11 (and FileNet I believe) being the most prominent and useful ones. We are repository agnostic, ship with Jackrabbit but strive to support all mature repository implementations on the market to provide choice to our clients.

Jackrabbit in turn has a persistence layer which abstracts the act of persisting content from they way it is done. This allows a number of brilliant persistence options - from using JDBC to access "any" database, specific adapters to specific databases to in-memory persistence (in fact, no persistence), which is massively useful for test and development environments, because the state of the repository can be exquisitely well defined in a snap, before tests are performed, and take much less time, since they are in-memory.

Finally, to get closer to the question, the various methods of accessing databases may allow a partitioning of the content that is stored. Certainly Oracle has many switches to slice and dice your data to your hearts content. More prominently even is the BerkleyDB (now also owned by Oracle) persistence adapter that allows you to define if blobs are stored inside the database or directly on the file system.

In any case, none of this makes any difference of how you access the content from within Magnolia, herein lies the beauty of it all. Combine this with the fact that Magnolia is repository-agnostic and allows you to use "activation" to move any content from one Magnolia instance to a second one (or several at once), you can start in any way you like, perform tests, set up another instance with a different configuration or database and activate your content to this instance, then repeat the tests.

This is the freedom Magnolia provides at the storage level, a freedom that allows our clients to match their requirements using any independent storage solutions out there today, instead of locking them into a proprietary repository, like just about every other CMS on the market does today, including other prominent open source players.

Why LGPL sucks for vendor driven open-source projects

2007-12-03T12:13:00.000-08:00

In a recent interview with Dennis Byron of ebizq I told Dennis why LGPL sucks for vendor driven open source. The reason is quite simple: System Integrators.

If a System Integrator writes a Magnolia module that is not available elsewhere, he gains a competitive advantage not only against other SI's but also against us. Under the LGPL (of Magnolia itself) he can distribute that module to his clients without open-sourceing it. In other words, if the SI and Magnolia compete for a project, the SI can offer the module for free, while we would have to charge for it (because we need to develop it first, which presumable the SI has done in a previous project). To repeat: the SI takes our software and adds his own proprietary extension, while simultaneously taking away our business. Hence, LGPL sucks for such a scenario.

The GPL avoids that, because anybody who distributes Magnolia with custom extensions has to provide the source code of these extensions under GPL. For Magnolia International the likelyhood of an SI licensing Magnolia Enterprise Edition (EE) increases, because the EE does allow such proprietary extensions without open-sourceing them. Either way, the community wins - if the SI does provide the module, they gain that functionality, and if he licenses the EE, Magnolia International has more funds to drive the development of Magnolia forward.

Hence, GPL is the way to go.

Going GPLv3

2007-11-13T17:56:00.001-08:00

We just announced that Magnolia Community Edition will be released as GPLv3. I am very excited about this step, it is one of the most "uncertain" steps we made since we originally released Magnolia 4 years ago. The reason for this uncertainty lies in the fact that we have had 16 years of GPLv2 (which we used in the form of its lesser variant, LGPL), but the version 3 has been around for less than 6 months, and very few mainstream applications have adopted it so far, so nobody knows how the "market" – in the form of open source developers, system integrators and our commercial clients – will react to this.

We have been thinking about GPL for a long time, ever since the Geek Meet (I think that was in 2006, right? time flies). We have discussed this step with all contributors months ago, and converted all source headers in the trunk to the new version a couple of hours ago. The headers now state that the code is dual-licensed - your choice of GPLv3 or the Magnolia Network Agreement (in which case presumably you have to sign the MNA and pay the license fee involved).

Let us see where this leads us. I certainly hope that more applications will follow where we lead. (No point in leading without followers, right? ;-))

Alea iacta est.

Something cool for a change

2007-11-09T15:59:00.001-08:00

I am just testing the first snapshot of next week's first major Magnolia release in a year. Quite amazingly, after less than 30 seconds I can call Magnolia in a browser and get this beautiful screen:

Now that looks great. So I click that link and it gets even better:

Now that just looks amazing. Fantastic work! You can see just how far we have come with our modularization efforts. Everything is a module now, even the core. I press "Install".

And after the successful installation, I get a friendly:

Fantastic user experience! Great joy seeing something new in Magnolia. Great work by our team! Am I looking forward to that release!

Open source business and RFI/RFP's

2007-11-09T15:27:00.000-08:00

I have had it. As an Open-Source startup that we still are, I believe we give a lot. Magnolia is one of the top 30 CMS vendors/systems on the planet, as exemplified by the CMS Watch report, the most relevant report of our industry. We give it away for free. We provide free infrastructure to the community. We provide free webcasts. We provide free trial versions of our supported Magnolia Enterprise Edition. You can call us, we provide free feedback on your ideas. We provide a free Evaluation Center and discuss your architecture – for free. We write new modules like the first ever JSR-170 forum (nearly released now) and give it to the community, for free, of course. We even stop by your office and present Magnolia without even getting a glass of water from you. Still free.

Now, there are those companies out there that have marketing budgets of billions. Staff of 100 thousands. IT departments the size of a small village. And someone gets the job to evaluate content management systems. So what do they do? They craft (or download) an RFI – a request for information – they send out to everyone they find in CMS Matrix. Never mind that all of this information can be found in the excellent CMS Watch report, or in the technology evaluation center report (for which I answered more than 3000 questions). No, they want us to answer all of their exact questions (however out-of-this-world and far away from their real needs they may be) in exactly their format within their deadlines – for free.

Well, the buck eventually stops somewhere. Do your own homework, or pay gazillions for the likes of Vignette to provide that service to you. In my world, I have to focus on what is effective for me. And I have decided that RFI's don't work for my company. I'd rather help those that go the extra mile and do their own evaluation.

I don't believe in check lists. I believe in working software. Download Magnolia now. And trash that bullet list.

Twitter

2007-11-07T06:29:00.000-08:00

Maintenance note: I added twitter to this page. Maybe I have outgrown using Skype mood messages to communicate what's on my mind? Micro-blogging seems at least an interesting idea, one way to foster a virtual social network.

Join!

Magnolia to be delivered with next iX

2007-10-22T16:39:00.000-07:00

Back at the time when I was still reading technical magazines, iX was my weekly fare. Well, the new release of Germany's leading unix magazine iX will have Magnolia included in their selection of Open Source CMS, and comes with the software (CE) on the CD accompanying the publication. When we started out with Magnolia, I said it will take 5 years to be mainstream. It is just a few weeks to our forth anniversary, and it seems we are starting to get the traction I was anticipating. Looks like I have to read another issue of iX after all these years ...

Alvaro hits it off in Spain

2007-10-10T06:25:00.001-07:00

Magnolia is getting a serious foothold in Spain, thanks to Alvaro (Magnolia employee) and our good relationship to the Spanish government, an early Magnolia Enterprise client. Here is a screenshot of one of the leading content management sites, ecm-spain.com, with a 50 minute podcast interviewing Alvaro as the top entry on the site.

Other good news from Spain include the imminent founding of Magnolia España to further strengthen our presence in the Spanish and South American markets.

When we released Magnolia 2.0, our whole company went to Barcelona for a weekend - this time, we are going to stay for good.

Open Source "One Laptop Per Child" getting started for real

2007-10-09T15:52:00.000-07:00

It seems like Nicholas Negroponte pretty much has gotten his baby out the door. I have watched his "One Laptop Per Child" with high interest in the last three years, and it looks as if the product is about ready to be released. For those that have not heard about this (where have you been hiding?) - the idea is to change the world by providing ultra-cheap laptops to children in places that often pretty much lack everything we take for granted in our electrofested daily lives. These laptops, originally planned to be available for 100$ each (minimum order size is somewhere in the millions) are now available for 200$ a piece, donations welcome. Read up on the details somewhere else, this baby cool.

Ah yeah, if you are interested to get your hands on one without ordering 999,999 others, there will be a limited time window of two weeks to do so if you join the "Give 1, Get 1" initiative. For the price of tax-deductible 400$ you get one laptop, and a second one will be donated to someone that really needs it. Think twice if it would not make more sense to just donate 2 XO's for the same price, and forego the "I want one" urge. The real sex-appeal of this machine lies in it's ad-hoc networking, which you will hardly experience if you are the only kid on the block having one at home, and honestly, you will feel much better knowing that the second $200 went to a kid that might one day change the world, instead of adding to the heap of techno-trash you have assembled in your studio. But still... better get one and give one, than get none and give none.

Any of course, XO's software is open-source, just like Magnolia.

Magnolia - output generation and content reuse

2007-09-25T06:39:00.000-07:00

Magnolia is often seen as a simple to use system for maintaining web site content. It is very easy to generate html (the most obvious output) and to edit content within the site structure. But that is not all of it.

There are often overlooked aspects to Magnolia's publishing abilities. I always like to point out that Magnolia's templating architecture is output-agnostic. That means that we can publish anything, not just HTML. This is supported through various means, one being our ability to map url-postfixes to sub-templates. For example, try .rss, .css or .print instead of .html for the magnolia.info home page to see othr publishing formats.

And while it is true that our standard interface is very easy to use because it is based on the structure of the final web site, we also have abilities for content reuse, in fact decoupling the site structure from content. New in Magnolia 3.1 we will finally add the data module, which takes this to a new level, allowing you to manage structured data in Magnolia. We can consume (and produce) RSS. This allows you to maintain your content outside of a site structure and populate the page content with that "external" (to the page) content.

Finally, the support of selectors allows you to access parts of the rendered page if your templates support it. Example: you can just get the header, footer, body or left column of a page if you want.

Anyways, there is much more to Magnolia than meets the eye of a casual browser, which is why we always recommend our Subject Matter Experts to be part of large scale projects.

iPhone

2007-09-12T05:09:00.000-07:00

Well. Yes, I have been rather quiet for the last couple of months. There is so much to tell you that I don't even want to start... but as I am writing this, I am unlocking my iPhone, and the things that the iPhone community has created in the last days (if not hours) is not only amazing, it makes me proud of my profession. YOU GUYS ROCK (you know who you are).

Last night I installed Installer.app, the BSD subsystem, ssh and a ton of other stuff. It is more fun than you can imagine - to see how fast things move. I have had the Nokia N80 for the last year or so, and to say that I am very disappointed by it is a politically correct statement. I have been waiting to through if off the Empire State Building ever since I got it (the N80, that is ;-)). I am nearly at that point now (15 more minutes...). I have waited to get any decent information or apps on the Nokia. Not that it would have been usable ... but there simply was nothing happening at all. I still have the same thing that I bought.

I have had my iPhone for three weeks now, and in the urban jungle of NYC (where you spend half of your life in cabs or waiting for a seat in a restaurant) it has become a life saver, even though I only had the default set of applications on it. But now, I can already install dozens of native apps, seamlessly, wireless. Select, touch, done.

And now this: I can now use my iPhone in the USA and in Switzerland. No more N80. Boy are they gonna sell the iPhone. Can we say another million in the next month? You bet.

By the way, if you would like to buy a really nice N80, send me a mail.

Top three pieces of advice for would-be open source CEOs

2007-06-21T08:06:00.000-07:00

For project leads I think that every project is different. It's hard to give general advice. The hardest part is to build up the community and ensure that its not a single-person project, else you will be busy answering emails 20 hours a day.
As a CEO, you should be able to accept that if you do open source business, others will get a big chunk of the revenue that you believe should or could be yours. Anybody can take your project and sell what you sell (service contracts, support, implementation, training or sometimes even the software in the form of derived work) without giving back to you. That is part of the game. You need a state of mind that accepts this as a fact of life, and be happy about the business that you do generate for your company.
Don't forget to go sailing on weekends.

Read the rest of my thoughts on Matt Asay's cnet blog.

Jazoon and Magnolia

2007-06-11T13:31:00.000-07:00

I just learnt that Jazoon is running on Magnolia. While this is an honor, I am disappointed that it is not mentioned anywhere on their site. We have not been invited to the conference, got no free tickets, got no slot to demo Magnolia or a sponsor logo (which technically we are). Given the fact that this conference takes place in Zurich, which is 1h train ride away, thats even more disappointing, since it would have been very painless for us to attend. Anyways, I wish them a great conference. Maybe next year, they don't forget to say "Thank you".

PS: I just sent a mail to the conference organizer, lets see what they come up with.

PPS: This morning I received a mail from Mr. Eberhard, we will receive a slot for a product demo and an additional conference pass. Am I glad I asked? You bet! If you feel like meeting up at Jazoon, drop me a mail (or visit us in Basel, its really just around the corner).

Boris Kraft, the photographer

2007-06-07T07:24:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled across a blog entry where it states "Photo: Boris Kraft" as the result of a Google search subscription about myself (yeah, I like myself ;-)). It is the company blog from my brother's design label, "Purple South". And yes, I am the photographer of the farn. I took the foto amongst many others on a trip to New Zealand a couple of years ago, and many of these photos have also been sold to the NZ tourist department, so I expect some of these to show up in others places, too.

As far as I know, my photos have been published two more times: once I entered the "picture of the week" for a news paper (and won), and once some of my "work" has been published in the Metropolis magazine through an article written by Constantine Boym, a Russian designer located in NYC.

Fun stuff to find through Google search ;-)

Girls like Magnolia

2007-04-30T12:01:00.000-07:00

I think this is a great viral commercial from Philipps! Check it out here.

Magnolia - a not-so-brief history

2007-03-29T06:55:00.000-07:00

The history of Magnolia really started out in the Summer of 2000. It was internet boom time even in Switzerland, and thus is came that one night, Pascal Mangold, C.E.O. and Founder of Mangoldpartner, and Boris Kraft, C.E.O. and Founder of Kraft & Partner met somewhat unexpectedly in Zurich. They had been invited by another company that wanted to gobble up the two upstarts for their specific know-how with respect to WebObjects.

It turned out that neither Pascal nor Boris were convinced that the concepts presented by the inviting company would lead anywhere. But the evening was not spent in vain: they immediately realized that they would want to work together.

In the following weeks they spent many hours drafting a concept for a new content management system code-named Gamma4 (unfortunately the draft has since been lost) and offered its implementation to a customer of Kraft & Partner for a price tag of two million CHF - a sum that was hard to pronounce for either of them at the time. The offer was rejected, but as so often, this probably helped more than hindered the course of things to come.

A couple of months later, Winter 2000 was approaching, Boris and Pascal decided to merge their companies, and ultimately created obinary Ltd., a company with three parters, and three lines of business. Michael Robertson was responsible for network and infrastructure, Boris Kraft (C.I.O.) for software development, and Pascal Mangold (C.E.O) for Internet projects.

In the coming years obinary realized many internet projects, and started using a commercial content management system called Soloweb by an Icelandic company. The merit of the product was its technological base: WebObjects. This made it a natural fit for obinary, who had been using WebObjects to create customer applications.

At the height of this time, obinary had grown to about 15 employees and revenue of 2 Million CHF. But times started to change. We heard the feedback from our customers regarding usability and realized that things can never be simple enough if it comes to creating user interfaces. We also realized that customization was a big part of any CMS implementation, and that it was getting harder to sell licenses to our customers due to the increased price pressure coming from open source alternatives.

Early 2003 obinary researched open-source content management systems based on Java, trying to benefit from "free software". They realized that of the very few java-based systems out there, none came anywhere near to what they were looking for in terms of usability, ease of customization and ease of installation. It even happened that Michael Wechner presented Lenya to their unbelieving faces (to paraphrase The Matrix: "There is no GUI"). Michael is a great guy, but Lenya was approaching obinary's needs from the wrong end. They were surprised of how much existing systems ignored the needs of their users.

In 2003 obinary started hiring people off of their competition, who was spearheading a new standard that later come to be known as the Java Content Repository (JSR-170). Sameer Charles joined obinary and convinced the management team that they should develop a custom content management system instead of trying to hack around a poorly documented proprietary system that was hard to sell, hard to customize and hard to use. Coming from the company that was busy defining JSR-170, Sameer suggested to build Magnolia on JSR-170, long before anybody else even heard of it - and long before there was any indication that betting on it would pay off.

In summer obinary hired Marcel Salathé to work on the GUI of Magnolia and subsequently released Magnolia 1.0 on November 15, 2003 (by no coincidence the birthday of Boris' brother).

While some people at obinary had doubts regarding the public interest in Magnolia, the first days of releasing Magnolia overwhelmed obinary completely. It was an amazing time (see http://betterfasterbigger.blogspot.com/2003_11_01_archive.html for some impressions).

So, why the name Magnolia, and why open-source? At the time, obinary already had launched a product called "obinary compass", a tool that later became Magnolia for Business Processes. Our original idea was to keep that naming convention and name our newborn CMS "obinary content". However, Boris could not agree to the name and in the subsequent discussion pulled the name "Magnolia" out of thin air. The name stuck after some initial opposition, and today is considered to be a brilliant name and major asset.

Open-sourcing Magnolia was a very pragmatic choice. Obinary was a small company with exactly zero marketing budget, and the competition seemed overwhelming. Obinary did not see a chance to place another commercial CMS in the market, nor was it their goal to sell software. Their goal was to sell services, as this is what they had done all along.

The Commercialization of Magnolia

Initially, obinary was happy that they could use their own Magnolia to implement projects. It also helped them pitching for services when they were able to tell potential customers how many people had downloaded Magnolia, and that it was used around the world.

Releasing Magnolia into the wild resulted in considerable amounts of unpaid work for obinary - answering emails on the user-list and on info@obinary, building a community, maintaining infrastructure all added up.

At the time, conventional wisdom regarding open-source software was that one could live off support, training, consulting, partnerships etc. Nobody told them that establishing these offerings needs considerable resources. Obinary found a great training partner in the USA and developed a five (later four) day developer training. They defined partnership options and contracts. They defined and communicated their support offerings.

But unfortunately it did not work as expected – at least not fast enough to make a difference to their bottom line. They needed to find a maintainable way of moving forward with Magnolia.

The interest in Magnolia clearly showed them that they were on to something - the benefits of making things simple were starting to be obvious to more and more people. The plan was born to built the best CMS in the world, and sell related products - for instance a yet to be implemented Document Management System. This way the visibility of Magnolia could be used to generate leads for their commercial products.

Magnolia For Documents was released October 12th 2005, delayed by many projects obinary did to finance Magnolia. The need for a java based Document Management was obvious at the time – too obvious, as it turned out. Due to their delays, a new open-source startup had grabbed their niche, and obinary's DMS offering was a commercial failure. While they did sell a few implementations, they had to change their strategy - again.

By the end of 2005, the outlook for obinary was bleak. They had invested in "obinary Compass", then open-source Magnolia, then in "Magnolia for Documents", with little return on investment. They had shed off all employees except for the bare minimum to survive - Pascal Mangold (CEO), Boris Kraft (CIO), Sameer Charles (Magnolia Core Dev), Philipp Bracher (Magnolia core dev) were the only remaining employees by the end of 2005. Obinary's third founding partner, Michael Robertson, jumped ship and founded a new company focused on network and infrastructure services.

At that time, Pascal and Boris had to make a crucial decision: dump obinary or struggle through. The easy way would have been to shut down obinary - everybody of the renaming team was highly qualified and would have had no problem to get well-payed jobs elsewhere. But the company's founders were confident that their investment would eventually pay off - the feedback from Magnolia's users was too encouraging to simply give upon it.

They just needed to find a way to "cash in" on their product's success. The new strategy was to create an open source Community Edition and a commercial Enterprise Edition. They added the previously separate Document Management functionality to the open-source Magnolia offering.

The renaming of obinary to "Magnolia International" mid 2006 was a logical next step. By 2006, Magnolia dominated their lives. Obinary as they had founded it no longer existed - the company had been transformed from a systems integrator to a software producer. "Magnolia International" would be the company focused on Magnolia, and solely on Magnolia.

Magnolia 3.0 was released November 15th, 2006, three years after the first Magnolia release. It was the first commercial open-source software that seamlessly integrated Content Management and Document Management. They had beaten their competition and started to gain significant traction.

The new business concept was easy to communicate. Additional functionality and unlimited support availability quickly established the Enterprise Edition as the way to go for many enterprise customers. By Spring 2007, Magnolia International Ltd. had gained significant numbers of Enterprise customers, had grown to seven full-time employees and enjoyed a splendid outlook of significant growth.

Epilogue

In Spring 2007, Magnolia has received a WebDev award as one of the ten best Content Management Systems 2006.

The company that originally wanted to buy Mangoldpartner and Kraft & Partner went bust in 2001.

It would take Pascal and Boris nearly seven years to make another two Million CHF offer - this time, however, for a system they already had deployed on thousands of systems around the globe - from small semi-static web sites to some of the most demanding sites on the web.

In August 2007, Magnolia founded Magnolia Americas, Inc., a new venture to cater to the needs of the US market. Magnolia has grown to 11 emplyoees and two staffed locations - Basel, Switzerland, and New York City, USA.

You, inc.

2007-03-11T15:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday in our local bookstore, I stumbled across "You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself" by Harry Beckwith and Christine Clifford Beckwith. I immediately liked it (for its title, its format and quality of paper!) and hence, I bought it.

Its been a while since I last read a book spanning more than 300 pages on a single weekend (especially on a nice, warm and sunny weekend) - this book is wonderful. Everyone should own it, and read it as often as possible. Go and do yourself a favor, buy it. Now.

"Selling yourself" is what you do all your life - from early childhood to old age. You might as well read up on it. The book is full of wisdom, in terse and fun-to-read style, not one of these books that are abundand with motivational stories and little else.

If you read just one book this year, read this one.

Magnolia awarded one of the best CMS of 2006

2007-03-09T12:35:00.000-08:00

Magnolia is nearly four years in the making and we finally won our first award. I don't know if this award has any relevance, but the company behind the award claims they have about 1 Million visitors per month, so thats not too shabby. They nominated Magnolia one of the 10 best Content Management Systems in 2006. Hooray!

Magnolia and Scalability

2007-03-09T00:02:00.000-08:00

Matt recently asked, how scalable Magnolia is (and other CMS).

First of all you need to ask yourself, what do you need to scale? Number of authors? Amount of Content? Requests served? DIfferent questions, different ways of doing it.

There are many ways to scale Magnolia - one thing is the built-in subscriber mechanism, so its straightforward to have lets say a HW load balancer and two (or more) public facing machines to handle the requests. You can write a custom Apache (or other) cache module (has been done before) or write a custom cache handler (cache is pluggable in Magnolia) if what exists with respect to caching is not meeting your requirements. You can cluster the repository (with the upcoming Magnolia & Jackrabbit 1.2).

You can use Akamai for caching (has been done for France24.com, a massive global news website). This site, powered by Magnolia, has content in English, French and Arabic, movies, audio, text, images, is updated simultaneously with the TV channels and has handled 50000 (fifty thousand) simultaneous requests when launched.

Last week we launched lastminute.com.au, the leading travel site in Australia, with booking integration, white-labeling of content, partial content delivery and other extravaganza. Their requirements are also pretty high regarding performance and scalability (they expect to grow).

(For partial content try this:

Using selectors we deliver parts of the page, so that it can easily be reused elsewhere.
)

In addition, we do have a portlet bridge in the EE that runs nicely with Liferay, in fact we currently do a joint project for a car manufacturer. It works very well, and scales the same way it would with standalone Magnolia, since the same mechanisms are used (each Liferay instance contains a Magnolia subscriber that handles the content).

Magnolia is now in its forth year of development, its pretty mature and we have a lot of experience with what works, how, when and why - or not. If you have questions, feel free to download our Magnolia Enterprise Edition and make use of our free evaluation services to help you get the most out of your time spent on evaluation. (Details come with the download).

Magnolia on JOSS4BIZ

2007-02-12T05:11:00.000-08:00

I have had the honor of being interviewed by Paul Worrall of JOSS4BIZ, who has previously interviewed the likes of Brian Chan, CEO of Liferay or David E. Jones (Apache OfBiz). The sound quality needs a bit of getting used to, but Paul assures you its worth listening to it. It has been great fun to do this, Paul has asked some excellent questions. Now all we need is the automatic "um" filter, right? ;-)

Listen now to the audio interview about Magnolia's past, present and future!

France24 - France's answer to BBC News/CNN powered by Magnolia

2007-02-08T02:34:00.000-08:00

Now the news is out and all over the press in France: France's flagship news channel is powered by Magnolia. Its a very impressive system, the site itself is available in 4 languages including arabic (right to left writing!) and contains lots of rich media like video etc.

Here is a screenshot that proves the point. (Note the green Magnolia edit-bars).

Its probably the biggest Magnolia reference to date in terms of visibility and traffic (1.2 million unique visitors in the first three weeks!). With a budget of 86 Million € its a pretty big undertaking. It should generate significant new business for Magnolia France. Good news.

Optaros Open Source Catalog

2007-01-17T03:55:00.000-08:00

Magnolia made it to Optaros' Open Source catalog, available from optaros online (you need to register). I am happy we get a trend of "up", less so with their estimation of our community and enterprise readiness, but well, it gives us room to grow. Lets see our rating next year!

OpenWFE made is in there as well, cool.

Top spot on Javalobby ... and their newsletter

2006-11-22T12:57:00.000-08:00

Javalobby has pinned a discussion about Magnolia powering their network as the top news item on their homepage, and in addition we were the top feature of their weekly newsletter. Needless to say, we are very happy about that. (Thanks Rick and Matt!).

Matt, Rick and I first talked about Magnolia powering their network of sites maybe 1.5 years ago. Back then, Javalobby decided it was to early to replace their custom software with a standard CMS like Magnolia. Since then, Magnolia has steadily improved, and JSR170 is much more on people´s minds than even one year ago.

We (Greg, me, Rick & Matt) had a two hour session today where we discussed the major requirements for their new infrastructure, which Magnolia can easily fulfil. Also Rick played around with their installation of the Enterprise Edition and enjoyed Magnolia´s ease-of-use.

I am excited about the fact that the best Java Community site likes what we do. Its up to them to see if Magnolia makes their lives easier or not - as stated in my last post, everybody in the CMS space has different needs. And replacing an existing system is always a major undertaking - to let go of all you have built yourself, to be at the mercy of something prefabricated - is usually difficult for any developer. But in the long run its inevitable.

By the way, this is just as true for Magnolia itself. We constantly discuss replacing parts of our product with new stuff that has been created by other projects. Its a lot of work, but it has significant benefits once its accomplished. For one, know-how of the product is not in the head of the one or two persons that developed it. And it might even be documented! In any way, its less work to maintain, and allows us to focus on the parts where we can add value.

Promises and products

2006-11-21T00:14:00.000-08:00

If you work in a CMS area, you know that there are more than 1000 CMSs out there. Most of them are more or less irrelevant, some are hugely popular (for instance, Typo3 is huge in Germany), some are very very powerful, and each one has its own set of pros and cons.

No system can reasonably fulfil all client's requirements and still be usable. Each client has different content management requirements. One of the reasons we developed Magnolia is that larger projects always need customization or integration. We thought that making these really easy to do and maintain, this could be a significant advantage for Magnolia (which it is).

So if you look at selecting a new ECM and are looking in the domain JSR-170/open-source, you will naturally have to make a choice between the two dominant players in that space: us - and them. We get asked about the differences between Alfresco (them) and Magnolia (us) about once a day by a prospective client. I have never answered these, but a recent posting on Javalobby made me reply along the following lines:

On the surface both "support" JSR 170. Magnolia is build on the API, whereas A. has added support for that API at a late stage. A. locks you into their repository, while Magnolia is repository independent. Since your data is where the value sits, that's a pretty effective lock in. Magnolia runs with any repository out there: Jackrabbit, CRX, Exo(?), soon Oracle and any new compliant repository. You have the choice.
A. is coming from a DMS end, only now adding support for CMS. DMS and CMS are not integrated in any way. Magnolia is coming from the CMS end, where it shines. Its DMS and CMS are integrated seamlessly.
God is in the details, and paper is no substitute for a product. Magnolia has been in the works for more than 3.5 years now, and our interest was always to build the easiest to use CMS in the world. Our clients tell us that working with Magnolia is highly intuitive and easy. I doubt that anybody would say that about A´s GUI (we have hear that system integrators simply replace their GUI with something usable, which obviously would be driving up TCO considerably)
Magnolia ships with Sitedesigner, a tool that replaces client-side web development software like Dreamweaver or Golive. This is much more useful than it initially sounds - you have to do a project with it to realize just how amazing it is to work this way. It saves massive amounts of time, layout is versioned (!), and updates work without worries (because we guarantee that).
Magnolia ships with the only opensource cross-language business process engine on the planet: OpenWFE. Its one of the top ten projects on Sourceforge regularly, and is amazing in its flexibility and power. If you want to integrate your business with your web initiatives, and send workitems ("tasks") to agents written in python, java, perl, dotnet etc that's what you can do. A. on the other hand uses something much less flexible and powerful.
A. was founded with a big pile of cash and massive promises to clients and shareholders alike. They have to deliver, and the way its done is by spending on marketing and sales. Magnolia on the other hand has been an organic development. No piles of cash to spend on anything, really. Just trying to create the best CMS in the world with a couple of smart brains and lots of experience.

A. is very successful at the moment selling promises. Magnolia is very successful at the moment selling products. Choose, but choose wisely.

(This is my personal view, and reflects in no way the view of my company)

Magnolia EE out - and Javalobby in?

2006-11-20T01:39:00.000-08:00

Its been a long while since my last post, and if you look at magnolia.info, you know why. We have managed to release Magnolia® 3.0 Enterprise Edition on November 15th, exactly three years after our first public release, together with the final release of Magnolia Community Edition and the first public release of Sitedesigner™, a tool to layout sites directly in the browser.

We have worked on Sitedesigner for more than a year. As they say: grass won't grow faster if you pull on it. Some things need time, and if we look back on what we had 6 months ago, we know why Sitdesigner needed that time. We have gone through endless tests and iterations and refinements to make Sitedesigner outstanding. It shows. The attention to details is what makes Sitedesigner a pleasure to work with. Try it.

Javalobby does already like the new Magnolia: There is an ongoing discussion if Magnolia would be a good foundation for their next generation community site. Join it!

Magnolia Geek.Meet 2006

2006-09-28T14:06:00.000-07:00

Last weekend saw the first ever Magnolia Geek.Meet, and it was a great event. We gathered in Mission21, a large protestant mission building that has 15'000 m2 of park around it and rents away meeting rooms, provides the catering and even is a hotel.

Attendees were Nico (Japan), Fabrizio (Italy), Chris Miner (Berlin), Greg (Brussels), Ralf (Stuttgart), Philipp, Sameer & myself, plus Pascal who came to say hi in the beginning & bye at the end.

I moderated the event. After a quick intro of who is who in Magnolia community-land, we started brainstorming. All topics then were voted for – each participant had 4 votes. We then proceeded to discuss the 4 main topics for roughly 90 minutes each, plus breaks. Rinse and repeat on Sunday.

Some of the big issues include

Beanification (a word that stuck after initial laughter) - meaning: create more classes (beans), which means they can be documented and even tested (!)
Introduction of Spring for various usages, including Spring Remoting (Fabrizio came up with a Spring way of doing basically any topic we discussed except documentation :-))
GUI toolkit/AJAX framework/XML-RPC/XForms etc - the whole world of what we could change with respect to technologies used today. When we started with Magnolia there was no Ajax, so we wrote our own. Today many options exist. Decoupling of the admin interface. Possibly use Spring remoting for intra-application communication (Think: GUI talks to core) and Inter-Magnolia communication. Provide alternate ways of accessing the content (Webservices, CLI)
Workflow Future: now that we have the basis, it is becoming clear that Magnolia's declarative dialog creation + openwfe and storage of workitems in JCR make it very tempting to create form & workflow-based front-end applications. What a great tool for SI's.
Dialog-Refactoring - introduction of JSF for dialogs and trees etc.
WebDAV for access of DMS through client file system browsers (Niko and Sameer start working on it, expect it working before the year is over)
lots more (I'll update this when I have my notes around)

We decided to have more releases on a shorter time frame with well defined major tasks (basically, each topic we discussed will be the focus of a single release). Now that Philipp has finally finished the build mechanism in maven to do a complete distribution (i.e. we can hit "build" and get readily packaged everythings - from wars, to bundled tomcats, community edition, modules... whatever) it is much less work to actually prepare a release. We expect to have dot-releases (3.1, 3.2 ...) every 2-4 months now.

Also we went out Saturday night in Basel, had dinner at the Hasenburg (Rösti) and drinks at the Des'Arts (a bar right below Day's headquarter).

Everybody liked the event and I guess there will be a Geek.Meet '07. Expect the discussions to result in a roadmap of versions, available via jira any day now.

And finally some impressions for those that had to spend the weekend with Japanese girls at Game shows in Tokyo or went sailing at the baltic sea (who can blame you?).

(more photos)

New iTunes

2006-09-12T23:00:00.000-07:00

I was probably the first guy back in highschool that had a walkman. I was a musician back then, having my own rock band, and music was what was surrounding me day and night, so to be able to listen to music on the go was revolutionary and elevating.

Being interested in music, I loved a web site that was publishing all song lyrics ( a community effort). What a great resource for quotes. Needless to say, it was shutdown soon enough by the music industry because of "copyright issues". I mean, come on "Love love me do, you know I love you" - I am not allowed to post this to a website?

Later, my company bought every employee a first generation iPod right when they were announced, back at the time that was a 11k CHF investment for us. I still got mine, by the way, but added Shuffle, a Nano and a Mini along the way. Needless to say, I have used iTunes since its very first day, and love it.

Now its already release 7 for iTunes. Congratulations. One of the great things is a new feature that lets you flip through your collection. You need the album artwork for that, and the first thing I did was to click the "fetch artwork" menu item. It works quite well, but I was wondering how they managed to convince the record industry to make them available.

Turns out they did not, or at least not in all cases. Several albums that are available in the store did not return their artwork. When you search for the album in the store, the artwork shows up, but in the iTunes cover area (lower left corner) it says "artwork available when purchased". Try it with "intensive care" by Robby Williams as a certainly popular example.

Steve (Jobs) does a fantastic job of bridging the gap between consumer's reality and that of the recording industry. But some things never change, right? I guess I have to use the old-fashioned approach and manually copy the album artwork for Robby Williams from some website like Amazon. Until then, the likelihood that I will listen to Robby is diminished due to the fact that his cover is empty when I flip through the 2652 songs I currently have on my laptop.

Who exactly has gained what by not releasing the album artwork?

Magnolia peak

2006-08-28T14:11:00.000-07:00

For some reason, this week has seen a strange peak in Magnolia interest. Magnolia has reached a traffic rank of 13'057 on alexa (that means we are currently ranked the 13'057th place of all alexa-tracked websites on earth, which should mean pretty much any website).

Now maybe that doesn't sound so thrilling, but if you know that at the same time our main perceived competitor's rank isn't even available because they are not in the top 100'000 sites, thats not too shabby. Not that I want to make much out of it, but it feels good.

Also, we are likely reaching a cumulative 150'000 downloads in the next 2-4 weeks, another milestone.

What else is news? An impressive list of large companies is in contact with us, we will be closing a number of significant deals in the next few weeks, and today has seen some serious interest in Magnolia from a very large company. Lets keep our fingers crossed!

And I will be in Paris launching Magnolia France later in September, just after the Geek.Meet.

Now all I need is time to write all these press releases…

WebObjects will be open-sourced

2006-08-28T13:53:00.000-07:00

This must have been one of the longest running tragedies in recent computing history. The short story is that WO (as WebObjects is known by its afficinados) is an outstanding piece of software if ever there was one, but never got off the ground commercially, was copied by Open-Source programmers, dropped its price from 50k to 600USD (IIRC) to free, and finally will be released into the open.

Parts of it (the Enterprise Object Framework) stem from the client-server time before the web as we know it was born. Apple (who bought it with its aquisition of NeXT) is using it to build their Web 2.0 suite of apps like .Mac or the iTunes music store, so the capability of it is proven beyond doubt. A couple of years ago I compiled a list of companies using it, and just about every major bank was on that list.

Alas, somehow WO never took off. Other frameworks copied the concepts or even the API. Just a view days ago, jope 1.0 was announced, which might have played a part in the decision to finally open-source WebObjects.

For me, this is several years too late. Would WO have been open-source in 2003, we might have used it to build Magnolia. Today, we are rewriting one of my last remaining apps of that time – an associative web shop that I wrote for the Kunstmuseum Basel – to Magnolia.

Congrats to Apple (and specifically Steve Jobs, who apparently wanted to open-source WO back in 2004) for finally doing it. I hope it picks up speed!

workflow state of mind

2006-08-22T07:30:00.000-07:00

Today John and I sat together to do some final testing of his decision table implementation. As so often the problem was with the data (data is root of all evil), not the software.

During our obligatory lunch pizza I mentioned to him that I think that programming with and for workflows differs from "normal" programming.

As a "normal" programmer, if I change code, I can compile it, test it, run it and if it does what it should, thats fine. In other words, I am pretty free to change all aspects of my system. Granted, I need to make sure that if I change the API, I change the implementations that use my API, but the whole process is pretty much independent of a time component.

When you deal with workflows, the picture changes profoundly. Why? Because everything you do needs to be done in such a way that long running processes still work.

At first that sounds pretty trivial, or logical. But if you work on a project that has processes running for a year and longer, the impact of this requirement is quite massive. It means that whatever you do (to improve the system, to fix a bug), part of the system will still need to run with the previous, maybe buggy logic. It means you cannot just change things, you need to find a way to know what you are allowed to change, and what not.

It would be nice if a system understands that a "normal" programmer is in a different state of mind, and provides mechanisms to protect her. For instance, once you launch a flow, all definitions could be versioned, so that the programmer is free to change them later without affecting the running system.

Alternatively, instead of versioning, a tool could warn me that there are still running processes that use a definition that I have just changed.

In the context of OpenWFE, workflow definitions are versioned, and the workflow that you launch has a copy of its definition stored with the engine. The same is not true however, if you define (sub-)processes to be loaded at the startup of the engine (a library). These are not versioned, but instead are valid as long as the engine runs (they can be overwritten if you want, since in OpenWFE's Scheme-like semantics, a function/method/flow-definition is the value of a variable, so you can change that value at runtime). Thus, if you change them, and restart the engine, running workflows use the new version of the library, not the one that was present when the workflow was launched. So there is a difference between a sub process defined in a "normal" workflow definition and one defined in a library even when they are syntactically equivalent.

This difference is exactly the difference you need to take into account if you start working with workflow engines. A workflow programmer needs to be in a "workflow state of mind", and take into account that whatever he changes, there might be running processes that depend on previous versions of a what he is changing.

Why OpenWFE?

2006-07-11T02:40:00.000-07:00

There was a post recently on the OpenWFE developer list asking why Magnolia choose OpenWFE. Here is why:

The decision was made quite some time ago, and it was based on my research and recommendations.

First of all, it was a license issue. I wanted to make sure we can change the license to something other than LGPL (Magnolia's current license) at any time should that prove of advantage. So all projects under GPL/LGPL were off my list. This reduced the list considerably.

Of the remaining projects the exact decision process is lost in time. However, I have looked at the features, the architecture, the perceived success/stability of the project (well, would I have known that John updates his software once a week I might have proposed a different engine :-)).

There were a couple of things at the time that attracted me to OpenWFE, one being that it implements the complete set of workflow patterns, one that its a top project at sourceforge (that makes it easier for me to silence critics), one being that it is cross-platform (that's a big advantage given the fact that there are no homogeneous systems in production).

Finally, I contacted John and found that he is a very likeable fellow (he sits opposite of me at the very moment). It is quite helpful if you can just call someone, or even meet in person, to discuss issues beyond "how to I open a terminal?". So the fact that OpenWFE is a European project and not based in the USA was definitely a big plus for us, because it makes communication very easy.

To sum up: license, features, architecture, success/maturity and support drove my decision.

Others will have other needs, and arrive at other results. Or at the same, but for different reasons.

Making Javaref really successful

2006-06-29T12:22:00.000-07:00

Javaref is the latest stab at making Javadocs useful – and of making a business out of utter lack of usability of the brainless default presentation that has haunted us for about a decade now.

Main ideas of Javaref:

search (that was a hard one to come up with ;-))
user profiles to restrict the libraries being searched (not especially way-out either)

Thats a nice start. Here are a few more ideas:

How about a mechanism that hocks into maven (which is used to build and document projects like magnolia). Such a plugin could use the maven-generated list of dependencies (and transitive dependencies) and automatically publish it as a project to Javaref (along with the source code or a link to the project's SVN code repository for Javaref to fetch at a later time).

The goal would be that its really easy for a project to have a profile at the Javaref site, and keep it up to date with each release. As a matter of fact, this should not be a profile (thats a user's domain) but a "project". Projects should be published and sharable (hey, viral, here we come!), and a user could have a list of projects he works on.

Now add a simple way to advertise the availablitity of the Javaref project at my project's site to drive my user base to your site (and give me back some of the advertisement cash you make in exchange) and you would have nailed it.

Come to think of it, if these guys don't built it, I might be tempted to build it myself ;-)

To unknown charters: Expedition Open Source

2006-06-26T12:17:00.000-07:00

The last three years have seen preparations of the great expedition called "To unknown charters: Expedition Open Source".

Big ships have set sail long before us, heavy vessels with plenty of food to keep the crew happy. But the tides have changed, and big ships are of little use in shallow waters. Most will be sunken or their crew starved before they reach safe lands again. They set sail when the weather was high and the fish was plenty, but the winds have changed, and so did the fish.

The Magnolia has set sail, and we are picking up good speed - the winds seem benevolent to our undertaking. Our ship is small, fast and agile. Our crew is well trained and multi-disciplinary. Our equipment is versatile and our compass shows the direction of change, the winds of which fills our sails.

Less than a week ago we have spotted the biggest fish so far, and we netted it today. It may have been a small fish for the big vessels, but for the humble Magnolia, its a big catch, clearly showing that for the well-prepared, the exciting journey across the ocean is worth taking the risk.

May long she sail in happy waters!

TSS Java Symposium in Barcelona rocks!

2006-06-26T11:59:00.000-07:00

I have been in Barcelona the last couple of days, attending the TSS Java Symposium - TSS's first in Europe. The event was excellent - the speakers were great: Simon Phipps keynote on the "The Zen of Free: Models for Understanding Open Source Software" alone was worth the trip to Barcelona. He really gets what is happening.

TSS Barcelona was also a great place to meet people, which is why I went there - I gave a talk about Magnolia with the goal of raising awareness in the Java community. I have met many interesting people and believe that my goal has been met – although it is always difficult to talk about a product/project at a technology conference.

It was a pleasure meeting all of you, and especially I'd like to say "Congrats" to Nitin and his team of pulling this thing off in just about 6 month's of preparation. I surely hope to be part of it again next year, maybe in Lissabon, Vienna or Prague?

Wireless access at conferences costing an arm and a leg

2006-06-21T08:03:00.000-07:00

I am in Barcelona right now at the TSS Java Symposium (and should prepare my talk instead of blogging) but here is a rant: while the location is certainly great, charging conference attendees for wireless access stinks. The three day pass for the conference is 1700 USD. The hotel is 280,- or so a night (But I stay in a cheaper place, we are an open-source startup, right?). On top of that, the wireless access is 17.40 € (22 USD) per day. Do the math: if 500 people want to access their email for the three days the conference lasts, they collectively pay 11'000 USD. Thats mad.

Besides, you can probably fly to Barcelona for the same amount you pay for a single day of wireless access. If you ask me, competition in the wirless space is not working correctly, or else it could not be so expensive.

3.0 is out the door, and I am in Barcelona

2006-06-20T09:36:00.000-07:00

We released Magnolia 3.0 today, and simultaneously migrated our website. The new website is awesome if I may say so myself, of course created with the new Template Designer we ship as part of the Enterprise Edition.

The site is featuring on its homepage a photo I did 2 years ago on the other side of the world. (guess which one ;-))

I have said so many things about Magnolia 3.0 on magnolia.info (about 100 pages of content currently published that I have written) that I won't repeat anything here. Well, one thing maybe: its featuring John's OpenWFE - this is a big step, the foundation of a system that will be amazingly in its applications. We have done many interesting things with it in the last 2 years, and I am very happy to see it move into Magnolia. Thank you John!

Finally, amongst all the crazyness, I flew to Barcelona right in the middle of the release, posting the news to all the web from my hotel room now. I'll be presenting Magnolia at the TSS Java Symposium - see you there!

Über-Sala

2006-06-05T11:01:00.000-07:00

Well. If you ever read my enthusiastic endorsement of Sala on LinkedIn you could have known. He is the guy that not only has great ideas, but he also follows up on them. I have watched his idea www.onethousandpaintings.com from the day one (no, I did not buy). It was always clear that there are two options - either it will explode, or it will sooner or later be irrelevant. Well, explode it did. The last time I visited the site before tonight - roughly two weeks ago - he had sold about 64 paintings. As I am writing this, 522 are sold, and I would not be astonished if the rest is gone withing 24 hours - after all, there is apparently a BBC interview coming up.

All of this is no coincidence, if you reads Sala's blog (one of his blogs, that is) you can very much understand how one thing adds to another. There was the funny death ad he copied from a newspaper that ended up on boingboing. And the applet he wrote to visualize Websites that attracted more than 100'000 unique visitors in just 4 days. Whatever Sala does is great.

Well, I am happy that its working out for Sala. After all, he was the person that wrote the first GUI of Magnolia and thus helped lay the foundation for its success.

I used his applet to visualize magnolia.info - very nice, I like visualization tools (right, John?)

Moving

2006-06-02T14:48:00.000-07:00

After many years with obinary at Binningerstrasse 15, we move on. B15 was a great place in many (though not all) respects, and many things will be remembered long after we have left. I recall one meeting with all of the top executives of a large retailer (early 2000) where Pascal was presenting a solution downstairs (then still Switzerland's smallest cinema) while I was frantically hacking it together upstairs. Or the time when Cyrill fell through the roof when trying to install the server room air conditioning (luckily nothing happened to him). The neighbours statement "I knew this would happen, this is already the third time" - still makes us wonder why she did not say so before Cyrill fell through the roof. The parties we had after we took over the cinema-come-jazz-club - surely many will remember the Magnolia 2.0 release party! At some time we even rented a second office in the front house on the forth floor. A web cam connection to see what was happening downstairs resulted in a funny movie still out somewhere - Josh called downstairs about 10 times a day just to see them pick up the phone.

Well, its time to say goodbye. And about time. We spend the last two months in the stables ( a former video studio, see the background blue box) as an interims office - no windows. All in one room. Thats because we had to move out of the main room (see deserted picture above) before we could move into our new offices.

This is a rare foto by the way - it shows Philipp, Leonie and Daniel. Leonie is now in Rome - and Daniel has only worked a very short time at obinary.

Well, we moved today. Servers are up and running (thanks Michi and Pascal!), all communication system live (thanks Kurt!), the coffee machine is working (thanks to Philipp, I assume - Sameer usually drinks tea) and the table soccer has found a new home (thanks Fröde!).

Time to say hello to our new place in Maiengasse 30 that already feels so much better! Lights! Action! Maiengasse 30 - Magnolia 3.0. Here we come.

Now all we need is better weather to open up these large barn doors and enjoy amazing tranquility in the center of Basel.

Open Source forces enterprise transformation: think value or die

2006-05-25T11:27:00.000-07:00

I have just returned from the Tranformation & Innovation conference in Washington, D.C.

I was accepted to talk about "How to evaluate open -source communities" (download slides) and invited Daniel Hinderink of Typo3 fame to join me as a Co-Speaker.

We are coming from opposite directions regarding Open-Source - Typo3 is community driven, where Magnolia is vendor driven.

Initially, we thought that this was a great distinction in the context of evaluting communities. However, preparing for the talk we realized that there the difference between the two approaches are smaller than you might think. This has pretty profound implications, as I shall outline below.

While at first (see slides) the projects are of very different nature, a vendor-driven Open-Source project is soon under pressure to build up its community, else it will not be perceived as "real open-source" and be deprived of many of the opportunities and benefits real open-source brings with it.

A community-driven project on the other hand is "real open-source" from the start. This brings many challenges - the main one being that the project is "project-driven" i.e. contributions are always based on projects undertaken on behalf of customers. Lacking an entity that defines and finances fundamental (architectural) changes to the project, there is no "long-term thinking" possible. To overcome this challenge (and overcome it must be else the project will ultimately fail) some governing body must be founded and financial means must be available. Typo3 for instance has founded the Typo3 association, which is financed by its members, and thus has the means to do long-term planning.

Once such an organization is in place, structure and planning can be imposed on the project - very similary to what a vender-driven project has from the beginning. And once a vender-driven-project has gained sufficient traction in the community, the lines between the two start to blur.

On the other hand, a vendor-driven project might sooner or later choose respectively be forced to found a governing non-profit. Once that happens, the difference between the two approaches is gone. This is the most logical step to avoid the risk of a revolution, although it sometimes back-fires (see Joomla!).

Why "be forced"? We are all in a transition in the Open-Source economy, and nobody really knows where the journey will take us – think of Calvin and Hobbes "Transmogrifier". One thing is for sure: there is no going back. Open Source is one of Friedman's 10 flatterners of the world. In the long run, software companies can either embrace it or vanish - here is why:

The "standing on the shoulder of giants" principle is especially true if these giants are readily available around the world for free
whatever you do, if the value of your product lies in proprietary code, someone out there will build an open-source version of it – because of (1) that gets easier and cheaper every day.
To meet that challenge, either you go down with your prices until you are out of business or go open-source fast, else any possibility to gain significant community mindshare is getting harder every passing day (especially if you are going from proprietary to open-source, where the community always suspects you of potential misuse of their contributions)
Once you are "infected" by the open-source virus, and build up a great community, a lot of value will be created by the community. In the long run, that value will be higher than anything you can provide code-wise.
Open-source is based on meritocracy. Once most of the (core-)code is written outside your company, the likelyhood of a revolution increases significantly unless you release most of the initial influence to a governing body that takes the real power distribution of the committers into account. (by the way this is why sugarCRM or mySql do all coding themselves, und therefore are no "real open-source" projects)
If there is a revolution, you are either dead or part of it.
If you give over control to a governing body, nothing is left of your crown jewels, so look where your value is. If there is none, the project might survive, but you won't.

This is a transition that will take place over time, and time is money. Hence the different approaches enterprises take today to make use of and possibly prolong that time:

upselling
dual-licensing
writing code themselves to buy time
trying to keep control of the project

It works, for some, and for the time being. However, one final thought – you are not the only vendor out there that considers to take the plunge into openizing your crown jewels. Once your competitor starts, you better move fast, or you'll be irrelevant before you know it.

Thats the power of open-source – it is a truly transforming force. It forces us to ultimatively think about value, and who would argue that this is not a good thing?

Magnolia - BOF at the TSS Barcelona

2006-05-18T12:55:00.000-07:00

I have just been accepted as a speaker for the TSS Java Symposium in Barcelona

I will present an introduction to Magnolia 3.0, directed at developers and IT Managers. Its focus is to get you up to speed with Magnolia as a product and as an open-source project. It includes a product demo.

You will learn

what Magnolia looks like
how standard content management tasks are achieved in Magnolia
why Magnolia is interesting from a technical perspective (pluggable anything, AJAX-powered GUI, JSR-170, OpenWFE integration)
who is using Magnolia (references, quotes and real-world data)
what exists community-wise and where to find more information
future directions (Spring, Freemarker, JSF, JSON, ...)

I would be especially interested to raise the project's awareness with leading java developers to get more great minds on-board for the project.

Hope to meet you there!

fresher than most

2006-04-28T06:19:00.000-07:00

With Magnolia 3.0 around the corner, and a new positioning of our products coming with it, we have decided to open-source Magnolia For Documents, our JSR-170 / magnolia-based document management system. The code will probably be checked in later today.

One reason behind this decision is that we strongly believe that Magnolia 3.0 will be so compelling, that our market share will rise significantly anyways, and be further boosted by the open source DMS. Magnolia immediately is the best open-source WCM and DMS available, so this is going to be a fun ride.

We also decided to scrap the planned (commercially licensed) web edition. Instead the community edition will be free, too, and offer functionality that is way beyond anything out there in the open-source area today.

In short, there will be:

open source (no binary)
community edition - free (binary with mostly open source)
enterprise edition - commercial with enterprise features like LDAP and JSR-168 support
business process edition - commercial

More soon through our official channels of communication.

to Matt: magnolia eats its own dog food

2006-04-28T00:47:00.000-07:00

In a recent post, Matt was under the impression that Magnolia.info is not running on Magnolia.

Well, he is under the wrong impression. Magnolia is using its own CMS for its homepage, and has been doing so ever since before we released the first version (November 15th 2003), exactly since July 16th 2003.

We have built some pretty amazing things with Magnolia, including magnoliaQT (edit videos in your browser, anyone?), Magnolia for Business Processes (draw and document business processes directly in your browser), and Magnolia for Documents.

Magnolia 3.0 will see its beta in the next week, including workflow and versioning, JSR-168 support, JAAS/LDAP, meta-templates including RSS feed generation (and consumtion) and podcast-generation, asset-management, scheduling and an even better new GUI.

As far as kick-ass sites go, thats a very personal perception, - here is one I like, using a quote from Brandon Root (Portent Interactive, who built the site):

"Thanks, you guys made my day Magnolia! We just finished up the Amgen Tour of California, www.amgentourofcalifornia.com, and everyone loved it!

We were very impressed with how Magnolia handled under the load, even before I got caching working. We averaged about 580 hits a second, although that was an overall average and we probably had about 4 times that during lunchtime. This was all running on a single server per magnolia instance, an intel xeon 3.0 ghz processor with 2 Gb of ram."

I think that kicks ass pretty badly, handling up to 8 million hits per hour. Maybe it needs two minutes for installation instead of one, but boy, that one minute sure buys you a lot ;-)

"Evaluating Communities" - part two published

2006-04-26T13:52:00.000-07:00

The second part of my article about evaluating communities has been published by the EOSJ (Enterprise Open Source Journal).

Magnolia Marketing Marathon

2006-04-14T12:38:00.000-07:00

Pascal and I spent two days in Ticino with the intention to take a break from our hectic office and prepare the marketing of Magnolia 3.0

Ticino is a fantastic place - the exact opposite of our office - nice view, amazingly quiet, a place were you can reset your brain and start to be yourself again, and be creative.

Unless you are constantly online, using skype to coordinate projects around the world, mobile phones while taking a stroll to the plaza in Locarno and generally do business as usual, which is of course what we ended up doing instead.

Nevertheless, it was great being there, and yes, the pictures really show 40 gramms of red hot chili peppers and a handful of garlic to go into a brilliant fish curry we prepared for dinner on the first evening.

We still have managed to structure our new website and come up with a couple of great ideas.

And the magnolias where in full blossom (just that I did not take a single snapshot). What a beautiful view.

Magnolia's Multi-Server Advantage

2006-04-14T12:34:00.000-07:00

Magnolia has built-in clustering capabilities. These come in the form of a pluggable publish-subscribe mechanism that allows to have any number of subscribers for a publisher.

Magnolia by default runs on a multi-instance setup - one authoring and one public instance - where the public instance is subscribed to the authoring instance.

This architecture has a lot of advantages. Two instances provide flexibility, performance and security. It separates concerns, scales well and allows creative solutions for interesting problems. Most of all, it allows to run Magnolia on two (or more) separate servers serving different purposes, namely to author content in a secured environment and to publicly serve the content to site visitors.

Stability
Stability of the public instance. Authors have the liberty to do whatever they need to without affecting the public instance. If something they do is so severe that the server needs to be restarted, this is not a problem. This even extends to developers that need to add new templates and other configuration changes that require a restart. All of this can be implemented and tested on the authoring instance without affecting the public instance which is visible by the user community.

Performance
The authoring instance needs system resources to facilitate editing content, locating and managing data, and constantly checking permissions. Often, you also output more log information, which costs additional resources.

The public instance is only concerned with generating cached pages and then serving those pages when requested. With this separation, content editors are free to tax this system as much as they like, developers can put in hot fixes required by content editors, and none of this impacts the performance or availability of the public instance.

Security
Commonly, you want the authoring instance to be behind a firewall, and the public instance accessible from the internet. There are mainly two reasons why this setup makes sense - one is to make sure that no one can publish content by directly manipulating the public server, and the second one is to make sure that information is only then available to the public when it should be. A typical example is the publishing of a press release or financial information. Authors can edit the information behind the firewall and only once the publishing date has come, this information is pushed to the public server. So even if - for whatever reason - your public server is compromised, only public information is found on the system. At the same time, since no authors need to access the system directly, you can secure the public server tightly.

Flexibility
Due to this architecture, you can easily run the two instances on two different servers (or more instances on more servers). For instance, one of our customers has the need to publish information to 70 standalone servers for security reasons. Each of these machines needs to be accessible "from within" if their location is cut of from the outside world. In that scenario, one author instance is used to drive 70 public instances - on 70 different servers.

Another example is having 20 different authoring servers publishing to a single public server to present the content -- this is a typical university setup, where each department wants control over its own server, but the university wants a single public access point, preferably using a unified look and feel.

Simply Magnolia

2006-03-20T07:43:00.000-08:00

In a press release from yet another venture burning open-source company we read:

Alfresco Announces Simple Open Source at BrainShare(R) 2006; Simple to Install, Simple to Use, Simple to Scale Out

Now this is so similar in its intent to what we announced for Magnolia more than 2 years ago that I am almost flattered. In its current incarnation, its worded as follows:

Magnolia makes content management as easy, fast and flexible as possible. Its streamlined features ensure easy deployment, easy templating and easy editing of your websites.

Magnolia's tag line once was

Everything Easier

And believe me, thats the way it will always be, no matter what the tag line says.

Feels like 1999

2006-03-19T06:48:00.000-08:00

This week I have hired a new employee (Daniel) on the spot, Pascal was in Spain and sold several Magnolia licenses to the Spanish Government to upgrade their current Magnolia site.

He came back Wednesday at 4PM - I left at 5PM for England, where I gave a 2 day advanced Magnolia user training in Ditcot for Diamond, who are building and running Great Britan's most advanced scientific research lab. The lab (and especially the synchrotron) will most likely become the largest Magnolia deployment in the world with a potential 70+ Magnolia servers - what a supreme reference. They are big Magnolia fans and they ordered licenses.

Friday evening an online order came in for an enterprise license (including CRX). This must have been the most successful week we had in the last couple of years.

Saturday Pascal and I finally had a chance to talk about last week's happenings and future plans. Magnolia 3.0 is going to rock the world pretty seriously.

By the way, we are still hiring.