Hi Marios
I would say Magnolia is very suitable for the task at hand... but then again:
If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail!
Amongst many other client projects we implemented a "hobby" project [1] which
covers many of the requirements you have described. This web application
manages sailing regattas (a couple of thousand), registrations, members
(roughly 20k) and so on and so on. As with your application different users
need to work with different forms:
- clubs, boat classes or regions can manage regattas
- members can register to participate in regattas
- the association can update member data and accounts
- and shortly there will be a public user registration for additional
functionality
Some more answers to your questions:
- If you have to work with lots of legacy data and cannot move the data to
Magnolia, have a look at modeShape [2]
- Magnolia authentication and authorization is done via a standard JAAS module
so yes, it's quite a bit of work but you could do the LDAP integration
yourself. However you might consider getting an Enterprise Edition license and
- save yourself the time to re-invent the wheel
- get supported software
- and it would still be open source!
-will
[1] http://sailing.fastforward.ch/web/sailCal/en/regattas.html
[2] http://www.jboss.org/modeshape
On 22.01.2012, at 20:57, Marios Skounakis wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have not had any experience with Magnolia but I have been looking at it for
> a couple of days as a candidate for basing a new system that I have to
> develop.
>
> The system's requirements are as follows:
>
> - The application must model a university at a basic level - schools,
> departments, courses, programmes, teaching staff, students.
> - The goal of the application is that the content managers must be able to
> create forms for gathering data about courses, professors, departments, etc.
> They need to be able to change these forms by adding or removing fields.
> Examples of forms
> - a professor information sheet that contains info such as publications,
> research, other activities, etc) (one such form to be completed per professor)
> - a course evaluation form to be filled in by students (one such for per
> course and student)
> - a programme statistics form with statistics such as the number of
> graduates, average tuition duration, etc (one such per programme).
> - Users must be able to log on to the system and fill in the forms for which
> they are responsible (e.g. a professor to fill in his information sheet, a
> student to fill in evaluations for his courses, a secretary to fill in the
> programme statistics sheet).
>
> I was originally planning to implement this application with the Spring
> Framework and a MySQL database. The data would be stored in a typical
> relational model, except for the form data which would follow a variation of
> the Entity-Attribute-Value model.
>
> Then we decided that it would be useful to have some simple CMS functionality
> such as the ability to create pages with static html content, manage news,
> have a simple FAQ section, maybe a feedback form, maybe forums.
>
> So we started wondering whether it may be better to use a CMS as the basis of
> the application and extend it with the university data modeling and our forms
> functionality.
>
> It seems to me that Magnolia is suitable for this system. I am thinking that
> I can get the basic CMS and user functionality from Magnolia and then find a
> way to integrate into Magnolia the part that handles the forms (perhaps by
> implementing a module or by using Blossom or some other way).
>
> So I would like to ask the list if Magnolia can be easily used for this kind
> of task, or if, for someone not familiar with Magnolia, will it be very hard
> to master it and integrate it with a custom application?
>
> I also have some more questions:
> - Would it be possible to use the JCR to store the university data? Normally
> I'd use a standard relational model for these. Are there efficient mechanisms
> for updating and querying the JCR? A lot of the university data will be
> migrated from other systems - is this easy to do with the JCR? Is it possible
> to use Magnolia to provide a basic interface for managing this data using the
> dialog functionality?
> - If not, is it possible to use MySQL for Magnolia's data and add some SQL
> tables to the same database to handle the university data?
> - For storing the form data I was originally planning to use a variation of
> the Entity-Attribute-Value model. Can this be handled by the JCR or is it
> better to use a SQL table?
> - There is a requirement that all components used must be GPLv3. This
> excludes the LDAP module which is proprietary. Will it be very hard to
> implement LDAP integration from scratch?
>
> Assuming that the part of the system where users fill in the forms can be a
> separate page and not part of a page, what would be the easiest/most clean
> way to implement it?
>
> Thank you very much in advance.
> Marios Skounakis
>
>
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