********************************* Happy Birthday Magnolia!
********************************* Foremost, we would like you to commemorate Magnolia's fourth birthday with a major new release - Magnolia Community Edition v3.5 RC1 - available for immediate download. About 300 issues as documented in jira have been worked on for this release. We choose to significantly improve the foundation on which we build the future of Magnolia, which makes this quite a technology-focused release. Here are some informal notes regarding this new release. As the version tag RC1 suggests, it is a feature-final release. Nevertheless we like to note that we re-factored one of Magnolia's main parts in the last two weeks, and bugs can turn up. It is therefore (as for any pre-releases) strongly suggested not to use this release in production. We'll try to make the wait a short one. We plan to release the Magnolia Enterprise Edition RC1 within the next week and expect final releases on November 29th, provided we don't hit any roadblocks. In the next two weeks we will also work intensively on the documentation and the sample content which is still the one of the 3.0 version. And now some words about the most important changes: Update / Install ---------------- We added a new installation and updating GUI. The main feature is the update mechanism, which allows seamless updates from 3.0.5 to the new and any future versions. The same mechanism is used for the modules, so custom projects will highly benefit from that feature, as you can easily deploy new versions of your custom project/module on the live servers. I18N ---- We added a basic mechanism for i18n content if you want a 1:1 structure for all the languages and not completely separated hierarchies. Custom implementations are now pluggable and we will improve that feature for the next versions. Beans for Configuration ----------------------- Many parts of the code now use a configuration-to-beans transformation which allows easy customizations of the many parts of Magnolia. For example you can reconfigure the implementation class of the user manager. All properties are then populated by the configuration (supporting child-beans, lists, maps). All that is combined with observation and automates component reloading upon modifications. Filters ------- We separated the modules and designed them in a way that multiple security and cache filters can coexist. All filters can be bypassed which allows implementing sophisticated custom solutions. As the filters are also built by the new configured beans feature you can for example implement complex virtual uri mappings. Security -------- We added the concept of URL protection so URLs can now be protected independently of the website content. We improved the concept of supporting the anonymous role and context. We also added the concept of user realms which allowed us to create a public user registration module (released very soon) Easier integration with other frameworks ------------------------------------------ We tried to remove many obstacles. The web.xml file has been drastically simplified, for example, and now contains only two entries: a filter and a context listener. We also enabled the support for a on forward filter dispatching. This allows using another framework in which you forward/dispatch to a Magnolia url. (Whatever you pass as request attribute is then available in the template) To increase the flexibility we also added the paragraph renderers, allowing special paragraph implementations. (We now have experimental support freemarker-based paragraph rendering, for instance) Activation flexibility ---------------------- Not only is the multiple subscribers feature now available in the CE edition, we also added support for a more flexible from/to mapping of activation. The structure of the content in the subscriber does not need to be a mirror of the authoring environment anymore. Jackrabbit ---------- This is actually not our merit but magnola 3.5 is delivered with jackrabbit 1.3, which is much more stable, flexible and faster than the version delivered with 3.0. Final Notes ---------- Enjoy, and as always we are happy to hear your feedback. Fire up the blogs, add issues to our issue tracker or discuss in the forums. Thank you for your interest in Magnolia! Thank you to the Magnolia development team, our many contributors and everybody at the Magnolia Group. Visit http://www.magnolia.info now for downloads Boris Kraft Magnolia International Ltd. ---------------------------------------------------------------- for list details see http://documentation.magnolia.info/docs/en/editor/stayupdated.html ----------------------------------------------------------------
