Do you have any exeprince with Magnolia CMS or other J2EE CMS solutions -then please read this - Please no - you should use PHP posts.
Now I have Magnolia running and all seems fine - However I feel a level of unease about Magnolia and many of Java CMS the few that exist that is.
Let me explain: It is an unease and a level of uncertainty as to the community momentum that Magnolia has.
1- On this list have have posted 5 times each time only Boris Kraft (thank you)- were are the rest of the Magnolia community?
2- Magnolia relies on templates - however were are these templates - I found a page (but lost it again) that listed the Magnolia templates a mere handful of them - FOR A TEMPLATE DRIVEN SYSTEM WITH A HUGE COMMUNTY I WOULD HAVE EXPECTED HOUNDREDS OF TEMPLATES - some of the templates even claimed that the template may have bugs and did not work correctly (guest-book template on the wiki).
3- I am on a few java mailing lists - the only CMS regularly mentioned is not Magnolia but openCMS and the most feature rich Java CMS is never mentioned prominently -
http://www.cofax.org
4- Magnolia is now in version 1 and soon to be in version 2 - is it mature enough ??? people say that nothing in IT is ready for real use until version 3.
5- I did a cms comparison on
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/matrix - now it seems to be a little out of data with its facts as far as I can tell however comparing Magnolia or other Java CMS solutions to the more established php and perls cms solutions makes the Java cms solutions look woefully short in features. - see
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/matrix
Thing seem to be missing from Magnolia as far as I can tell [ THESE MAY ONLY BE IMPORTANT TO ME - BUT MOST NON JAVA CMS HAVE SOME OR MOST OF THEM ] are - Blog + Chat + Syndicated Content (RSS) + Advertising Management + Photo Gallery + User Surveys + User Contributions + File Distribution.
Are these feature really missing ?? Or Are they meant to be implemented as a template if so see point 2 - Or is this just a question of maturity of Magnolia and all I need to do is wait to them.
Not to be a total bummer - On the plus side -
1- Magnolia is very easy to set up - no need for Ant - Mysql or other packages to be pre-configured
2- Is not focused on Windows developers unlike so many other projects
3- The Magnolia web-site is not an eye sore and projects a level of professionalism and commercial viability that others do not.
4- It is future proof with JSR-170 specification
5- I like java and I know JSP I do not want to go down the PHP path - familiarity breading laziness some would say.
I welcome any constructive feedback
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