Magnolia CMS
Media & Publishing
Timely delivery of content is crucial in today's news cycle. Coverage needs to be posted on the site as events occur on the ground. The same is true in a corporate setting. Reacting to market events and communicating with customers requires a CMS where editorial and publishing processes are simple and intuitive.
Media companies need to pull in content from many sources and publish it in various formats. Web is not the only channel. For many, mobile and tablets have taken over as the primary delivery platform. Orchestrating it all requires standardization and centralized content management.
Benefits of Magnolia CMS for media and publishing
STK for fast reaction time
Magnolia's Standard Templating Kit (STK) is a best-practice framework that allows quick repurposing of existing templates and sites. Create microsites and campaigns with minimal effort, speeding up product and event launches.
Multisite
With Magnolia you can manage any number of sites in one instance. Region and language specific sites are added through configuration, repurposing existing templates and branding to a high degree while allowing for completely unique sites.
Combine editorial and user-generated content
Let users comment on editorial page content and contribute forum posts. Engage visitors by signing them up as public users. Comments can be stored on a third party system (IntenseDebate) or in Magnolia. New social media platforms spring up every day. With Magnolia's open architecture and flexibility you can integrate with them right away.
Social Media and Web 2.0
Integration for social bookmarking services (Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us) is available out-of-the-box. Display RSS feeds from social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn) or generate an RSS feed of any Magnolia content. Publish Web 2.0 style audio and video via multiple channels. Use the workflow or commands chain to push content to a third party site. You can even manage Flash content.
Search engine optimized
Magnolia produces W3C compliant code and support known Web protocols such as sitemaps. It generates search-engine friendly, human-readable URLs. Content can be categorized to support discovery by interest with keywords. See SEO Tech Brief on the right for more.
Branding, pixel-perfect layout
Full control over presentation and layout. Best-practice templates for common use cases (articles, sections, news, events) provide a starting point for creating completely unique sites. Top media agencies such as Campbell-Ewald and Aperto choose Magnolia to enforce brand awareness on sites that call for visual appeal.
Performance and scalability
The foundation of every well-performing site is a certified stack of components. The recipe calls for locating your database close to Magnolia and configuring multiple public instances to handle sudden high load and blackouts. Magnolia supports content publishing to multiple subscriber servers to spread load and remove bottlenecks.
Imaging engine
Magnolia's Imaging engine simplifies working with images. Instead of resizing individual images, you upload a single source image and configure Magnolia to generate variations for teasers and thumbnails on-the-fly. This is particularly useful for news sites using different variations of an image on front page and section pages to tease a story.
Mobile
The Imaging engine can also generate variations for mobile devices. Combine this with a custom template and CSS style sheet to publish content in mobile-friendly format. HTML5 makes the site feel like a native mobile application while XHTML delivers the content. Deliver longer documents to tablets such as iPad in electronic publication format. EPUB is XHTML under the covers which, conveniently, is Magnolia's native format for Web pages.
Having a single system with such a refined workflow will dramatically reduce the cost, time and man-hours needed to bring our content to the web.
Augusto Chollet, Head of Multimedia of RSI
Time and cost savings through simplicity
Media and advertising agencies are Magnolia's traditional partner stronghold where the ability to repurpose existing sites and templates is valued highly. In the time it took to launch one or two sites, an agency can now launch a dozen sites. Managing product microsites, campaigns and event sites in the same Magnolia instance as your main site makes centralized brand management possible and ensures consistent corporate image through reuse of assets.
When you need to add a dozen sites per month to a growing online presence you start to value simplicity and flexibility very quickly. An intuitive editorial interface allows more people to contribute. Adding content to a site should not require technical expertise. Integration with social media sites acknowledges readers and media consumers as content contributors too.
Magnolia produces search engine optimized pages, which means content is indexed and can be found. Scalability through multiple instances and clustering removes performance bottlenecks.
Selected clients
- Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC)
- LaFeltrinelli
- Sony Playstation
- VPRO, Dutch broadcaster
- RSI (Radiotelevisione svizzera di lingua italiana)
- RTR (Radio e Televisiun Rumantscha)
- LOVEFiLM, entertainment and film site, "Europe's Netflix"
- PlayStation Digital Comics, largest assortment of comics in the digital world.
- EADS UP, a Flash-powered magazine maintained with Magnolia CMS
Success Stories
Magnolia CMS Powers Content for SOA-based Website LOVEFiLM
LOVEFiLM, a leading European film & TV subscription service, was looking for a CMS to help run their editorial back-end. After an extensive due diligence process that looked at a variety of CMS products, proprietary and Open Source, LOVEFiLM chose Magnolia because it was Open Source, but with Enterprise-grade support. Magnolia’s extensibility coupled with their SOA approach has enabled LOVEFiLM to provide content services to a variety of areas of the business such as: Editorial, Sales and Marketing. read on Magnolia CMS Powers Content for SOA-based Website LOVEFiLM
Aperto and Magnolia Implement New CMS Infrastructure for Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC Group) in Dubai, UAE
Aperto AG has successfully carried out the portal relaunch of MBC Group, the largest media group in the Pan Arab Region. Aperto deployed Magnolia CMS for all portals and created a custom-tailored editorial environment featuring efficient workflows, replacing the previously used Vignette system. MBC Group can now reach its 165 million viewers faster, better and more inexpensively over the web. read on Aperto and Magnolia Implement New CMS Infrastructure for Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC Group) in Dubai, UAE
Magnolia for VPRO's Pinkpop Music Festival Website
VPRO Television, a national public broadcasting company in the Netherlands, created a social media mashup site for Pinkpop, the largest pop music festival in the country. In this Magnolia Conference presentation VPRO shows how creating the new application Magnolia allowed them to repurpose it for other sites. read on Magnolia for VPRO's Pinkpop Music Festival Website
Video: VPRO Pinkpop
Magnolia won our CMS selection particularly because of the multi-site support. The open source character and possibility to modify and extend the software is highly valued. The combination of an open source product with company support is also important. The community is not the largest, but knowledgeable and helpful.
GertJan Kuiper, VPRO Digitaal - coördinatie projectleiders