Magnolia CMS
Thinktank builds Portal with Magnolia CMS for INSM
The Initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft (INSM), or Initiative for the New Social Market Economy, lobbies for market-oriented reforms in Germany while expanding on the model of a Social Market economy for use in policy internationally. In order to better accomplish its goals, INSM hired Magnolia Partner Aperto, a web development firm, to create a new portal. They chose to use Magnolia CMS Enterprise Edition and Aperto partnered with Magnolia.
INSM
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- Logo INSM
Initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft (INSM), or The Initiative for the New Social Market Economy is a group that advocates for market-oriented reform in Germany, and spreads information world-wide about the German model of Social Markets. Mainly funded by the German metal and electrical industries, INSM is a think-tank that has no party or other political affiliation. Tasked with renewing Ludwig Erhard's social market economy ideas for the 21st century, INSM's purpose is to use modern communications to influence key economic and social policy debates in Germany, and world-wide.
Since the end of the Marshall Plan after WWII, Most of Europe has followed Germany's lead in building Social Market economies. INSM believes that Social Market economies are the best model for the 21st century, but will have to change and adapt to the new realities of globalization, the knowledge economy, and demographic shifts.
Implementing INSM with Magnolia EE went much faster than anticipated. Another Enterprise CMS would have taken months longer.
Sebastian Frick, Technical Project Manager, Aperto AG
| Client | Initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft (INSM) www.insm.de |
| Implemented by Magnolia Partner | |
| Infrastructure | 1 author and 1 public server, Tomcat and MySQL (standard settings) |
| Number of pages | 1,500 pages, with 250 images, 250 pdfs and various video and audio |
| Number of content authors | 7 content authors, all expert editors with backgrounds in fields like economics, policy and sociology, none with significant web development experience. |
| Unique visitors per month | Over 60,000 |
Case Study Video and Slides
The Situation: Looking for a More Flexible Content Management System
Expert content creators
INSM's seven content creators are all experienced editors with backgrounds in economics, social policy or government. None of them have significant HTML or CSS skills.
It is a core part of INSM's mission to use modern communications technology to get their message out. This often resulted in articles for the site incorporating charts, graphs, even video and audio. Whenever the content went in a direction the CMS initially used by INSM was not prepared to follow, something had to be custom-coded, as the templates were hard-coded and could not be change easily in the CMS that got replaced by Magnolia.
Magnolia is chosen
INSM knew they were facing a difficult challenge. Import and export between Content Management Systems is more of an art than a science, often involving lots of integration work. Even if that issue could be solved, they still needed a system that could handle the diverse content of INSM and allow for flexible, easy templating. On top of this, many of the available Enterprise CMS systems were so expensive as to stretch INSM's budget. Aperto has an in-house CMS, but adding more functionality to it specifically for this client would have increased their maintenance costs on the software.
The situation before Magnolia CMS had been introduced at INSM:
- The INSM web properties had grown considerably since the old CMS was introduced.
- The demands for templates that could easily handle multi-media and non-standard content layouts required web development that could not be done by the editors.
- This made any migration to new theming or layout very labor-intensive as most pages had to be manually updated.
- Any migration to a new CMS looked difficult as CMS vendor's complicated import-export functionality is not always easily integrated.
The Solution: Magnolia Enterprise Edition and the Templating Kit
Evaluating enterprise CMS
Most of the Enterprise CMS clients INSM evaluated either lacked the functionality they needed, wouldn't have an easy migration path for the content, or was far beyond the budget in cost.
INSM needed to find a CMS system that:
- Could handle a standards-based method of moving data from one CMS to another
- Was extensible enough to handle INSM's needs
- Was preferably Open Source, to enable easy development of new features
- Could scale to enterprise needs
Migrating to Magnolia EE
INSM realized that the best approach would be to take a solid, stable, enterprise-class Open Source CMS solution and implement the 10% extra that INSM needed. After reviewing their needs and the market, they reached out to Magnolia.
INSM bought Magnolia EE, and the Magnolia engineers immediately got started teaching the developers about Magnolia and getting them up to speed. Over the course of the next 3 months, Aperto built a world class web portal for INSM. During this time, Aperto had to:
- Migrate content from the old CMS to Magnolia
- Develop a set of templates and related functionality, so that new pages created by INSM could have the flexible layout they needed
- Beta test the new templates
- Deploy the whole system
The Result: A Web 2.0-enabled Portal
User Generated Content (UGC) and flexible templating
INSM's new portal ensures that content authors can easily structure content in different, yet well defined ways to quickly publish appealing web pages that include audio and video. Furthermore does it allow visitors to engage with INSM through the commenting functionality available in Magnolia STK.
Because of the new Standard Templating Kit, It was possible to develop a state-of-the-art Web 2.0-enabled website to INSM in short time. Magnolia CMS plus the STK uniquely combines flexible templating with User Generated Content (UGC) - a powerful feature mix that meets the requirements of today's modern campaign websites.
High usability and minimum server resources
Magnolia EE with the STK makes life easier than ever for INSM's 7 editors. The STK provides easy to use templates for the majority of their work, and they can be easily modified whenever the content makes special demands of the formatting.
INSM has Magnolia running on only two servers, a publishing server that hosts the site, and an authoring server.
Graceful and simple content migration
INSM embraced a simple yet effective content migration strategy: First they exported everything in the old CMS to static HTML pages. Next, they manually transfered some of the content to become dynamic pages rendered by Magnolia CMS. Both has been integrated seamlessly so that visitors of the new INSM portal either see old content delivered by static HTML pages or content generated by Magnolia CMS - yet it all appears within the same overall design, domain, etc.
With that strategy, INSM avoided content migration hell and the editors can concentrate on creating new content instead of bothering about old content.
Magnolia has improved our productivity in unexpected ways. Often our editors will produce stunning pages that we previously thought were only possible with a professional web developer. The high usability and flexible page layout process allows us to deliver persuasive content to our website visitors and interact with them.
Christoph Windscheif, Senior Consultant, INSM
Conclusion
The time and money saved by going with Magnolia enabled INSM to focus more on content generation and productivity, improving their ability to accomplish their goals. Using community-enhanced Open Source software allowed INSM to become a more effective public force for using market processes to accomplish social goals.
Magnolia Enterprise Edition allowed INSM to develop and deploy a world-class web portal for a fraction of the cost and effort of a proprietary enterprise CMS.
Further Information
- More about the Magnolia Partner that implemented the INSM site: Aperto AG
- Learn more about Magnolia Enterprise Edition
- From the creator of Magnolia: support and services