Roadmap Magnolia 5.0

Magnolia 5 is looking at Content Management from a completely new perspective – yours! For the last couple of years we have looked into how we can make Content Management in the enterprise even easier, and Magnolia 5 will take that research and turn it into a product you will love to use. Not only will it look and feel great, but it will also work on the iPad, so you can work on these content updates and workflow approvals from just about anywhere.

Details like full keyboard support and "undo/redo" functionality will make working with Magnolia a joy. A new Digital Asset Management makes working with digital media a breeze, and we'll provide web page & document previews throughout the system.

Our support for industry standards will be pushed up a notch: after introducing JSR-283 and CMIS in Magnolia 4.5, Magnolia 5 will add OpenSocial to the mix to make it even easier to use Magnolia as your content management and publication system.

Magnolia already has a proven track record in mobile - with Magnolia-powered Apps for the iPhone and iPad available through the Appstore. Magnolia 5 will see a continuation of that trend and provide more support for mobile websites out of the box.

Magnolia 5 will be the basis on which we will build the future of content management, including even better social media integration, marketing functionality and analytics integration, which we plan to add once Magnolia 5 has been released. We look forward to see you onboard.

Improved User Experience

We will completely re-invent the user interface for Magnolia 5.0. We will use new technologies and rewrite the GUI to be even more powerful, more user-friendly and more modern overall.

Our trusted custom GUI framework has reached its limit and we will happily switch it out to Vaadin, a framework that provides server-side execution, efficiency and allows us to write GWT applications in an economical way. The GWT part means we'll be using the Google Web Toolkit, a powerful piece of technology that allows us to develop and test in Java instead of JavaScript. This reduces development complexity and improves our time-to-market, and again, this technology has a large talent pool available.

All in all, the new foundation for the Magnolia GUI will make Magnolia even easier to use, extend and customize. At the same time it reduces the barrier of entry to do so.

Digital Asset Management

Magnolia 5 will integrate Digital Asset Management with the same ease-of-use that you expect from Magnolia. While you can already manage digital assets with Magnolia today, the new DAM will provide additional functionality including easy scaling and cropping of images directly in Magnolia.

New Workflow Engine

Magnolia 5 will see the introduction of a new workflow engine. The world of workflow has evolved and we are ready to again provide a top notch workflow implementation based on the latest standards. As we are rewriting the UI for Magnolia 5, this is a perfect moment to swap out some of the back end components as well, so look forward to new workflow management capabilities in Magnolia 5.

Multi-Channel & touch support

The design of Magnolia 5 will take new channels like the iPad and iPhone into account. On one side, the new architecture will make it very easy to build mobile applications that interact with your web front. On the other hand, the administrative interface will take the new interaction patterns into account and ensure that AdminCentral can be used with touch screen devices like the iPad.

Better Integration

One of Magnolia's strong points is its ease of integration. Magnolia 5 will build on this strong foundation and introduce OpenSocial as well as WebDAV for documents.

Beyond Web Services, Magnolia 5 will also provide OpenSocial support out of the box. OpenSocial is the future of building enterprise portals, and fits very well with Magnolia-s component-based approach to content management. In short, wherever you have a paragraph (i.e. a page component) today, you can have an OpenSocial gadget (or portlet) in Magnolia 5. 

Magnolia 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.

Further info

The Magnolia team is busy defining the future of content management – on the desktop as well as on touch devices. If you wish to follow the development team's progress, head over to the Magnolia 5 wiki space, where we discuss all concepts, provide mockups of the user experience and help you find the latest builds of Magnolia 5.