Roadmap Magnolia 4.5

Magnolia 4.5 is a stepping stone to Magnolia 5. Its focus is less on new features but on new API's, which allow existing customers a gradual shift to Magnolia 5 by migrating existing sites to Magnolia 4.5 first. New projects developed on Magnolia 4.5 are expected to run on Magnolia 5 without further modification.

A smooth migration path to Magnolia 5

Magnolia 4.5 will introduce the new (i.e. Magnolia 5) templating and new security layer (JCR 2.0) as well as CMIS web services. Existing customers can migrate their websites to the new templating API's while waiting for Magnolia 5's new UI & DAM. For new customers, 4.5 will allow to already develop their projects against the new API's, such ensuring a smooth upgrade path to Magnolia 5.

Standard Templating Kit (STK) 2.0

Magnolia 4.5 comes with a completely updated Standard Templating Kit. STK 2.0 will be HTML5 compliant, easier to extend, easier to customize and more accessible.

Instant Mobile Websites

Magnolia's new mobile support will make all sites developed with the Standard Templating Kit instantly available as a mobile version. STK 2.0 will come with a customizable mobile theme, which will take your same site content and render it differently for mobile devices.

This mobile theme can be simply used to display your site in the same mobile way for all devices, or can be easily copied and modified to create variations, which render differently for various mobile handsets and tablets.

See more screenshots of the mobile site.

CMIS web-service API

One of Magnolia's strong points is its ease of integration. Magnolia 4.5 will build on this strong foundation and introduce CMIS. CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services), a standard that Magnolia co-sponsored and which has gained traction in the document management and ECM world, will make it easier to share access to Magnolia documents with other content management systems, such as Sharepoint and Alfresco.

JCR 2.0

Magnolia 4.5 will run on the JCR 2.0 (a.k.a. JSR-283), the followup standard of the Java Content Repository API (JCR). This will make it much easier to add WebDAV access to the document management, asset management and web content management parts of Magnolia, in other words, it will be easy to access Magnolia content directly from your desktop / file system.

Inversion of Control (IoC)

Inversion of Control (or Dependency Injection) is recognized and accepted as a design principle which helps improve testability (and thus quality), code readability, maintenance and understandability. Specific benefits include loose coupling between components, more reusable classes, cleaner code and easier to test classes.