Magnolia CMS
Standard Templating Kit 2.0 (STK)
The STK is a production-ready website construction framework that provides best practice solutions and templates for common use cases. It includes an extensive set of ready-made functionality that can easily be extended for custom designs and content output.
For Magnolia 4.5 we have updated the STK to adhere to newest best practice in CSS, semantic web and HTML, including HTML 5 video and forms support. We also added a new Mobile Templating Kit which makes your STK-sites easily available as mobile variations.
In the beginning, we didn’t recognize the advantage. Now, it’s hard to imagine how we would have created the site otherwise. The templating kit saved us an enormous amount of time and provided everyone with a unified structure to work to.
Tobias Müller, Developer, Global Web & Multimedia, Elekta
Technical and business benefits of the STK, relative to the three main stages of any Web CMS project...
1) Analysis and Requirements Definition
| STK Technical Benefits | STK Business Benefits |
|---|---|
| Rapid prototyping enables better, faster and clearer definition of customer requirements. | Rapid prototyping helps manage customer expectations and streamlines review and approval workflows. |
| Rapid prototyping enables engineers to consider multiple design approaches and select the one best suited to the task at hand. | Rapid prototyping results in fewer possibilities of deviations from spec during development and reduces overall project risk. |
| Modular template architecture ensures that projects can be designed and implemented quickly, by modifying existing templates for new use cases. | Modular template architecture promotes extensibility and allows new interface elements or functions to be added at a later date without much refactoring, at a lower expense and on a shorter schedule. |
2) Development & Testing
| STK Technical Benefits | STK Business Benefits |
|---|---|
| Extensible, modular template system allows easy customization for special needs. | Automatic implementation of best practices ensures long-term maintainability and allows for future feature additions at reasonable cost. |
| Standards compliance and pre-testing on major browsers ensures that final output appears the same on all browsers. | Browser compliance reduces development time and project risk. |
| Separation of presentation, content, and functionality produces cleaner and more maintainable code. | Separation of concerns produces shorter and more productive project timelines and results in more efficient teamwork. |
| Support for unit tests ensures quality and backwards compatibility with previous versions. | Unit testing ensures product quality and reduces upgrade risks. |
3) Deployment
| STK Technical Benefits | STK Business Benefits |
|---|---|
| Optimized template code simplifies construction of high performance, scalable Web sites. | Modular architecture enables “hot swapping” of templates to quickly enable interface or functional changes in production environments. |
| Greater reliability and scalability accruing from use of best practices reduces server administration and hardware upgrade costs. |
The use of the Magnolia CMS and its STK makes fast, efficient and high-quality project implementation possible in a way I have never experienced with any other CMS product.
Ingo Werren, Senior Project Manager, Aperto AG
STK features which can be used to address the following business requirements
| Requirement | STK Supporting Features |
|---|---|
| Easy customization and maintenance |
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| Process Efficiency |
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| Standards-compliant, accessible markup |
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| Multi-language capabilities |
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| Scalable and Extensible |
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| Low total cost of ownership |
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