Feature
We're at version 4.4.6 and counting for Magnolia's latest milepost to the whopping 5.0 upgrade. But we first have to get to v. 4.5 and that release is now promised for the end of this month for the top tier, open source Enterprise Content Management System.
But if it's beginning to feel a bit like the film Groundhog Day stuck in v. 4x release world for Magnolia, fear not, as Roadmap Magnolia 5.0 is live on the Magnolia web site and rest assured we are told, each incremental 4x upgrade (including this 4.5) brings us closer to the v. 5.0 nirvana that will include better social media integration, marketing functionality and analytics.
Automatic Mobile Websites
What's on the table for this v. 4.5 round is a focus on the hot mobile market and "Standard Templating Kit 2.0" that renders every site in a mobile version, with free mobile support. The technology standardizes content types, reusing content on both standard and mobile landing pages. With it comes the promise from Magnolia: no more creating separate mobile sites, plus site management from a single authoring system, as a kicker.
Benefits to this "create once, publish everywhere" approach include new multichannel management tools that help get a handle on the web content now published for everything from e-Books to TV images, e-mail to PDFs. The technology helps define how content appears across the scope of channels offered, with new channel detection algorithms allowing developers to "...render[ing] content in an unlimited number of ways," according to the release.
Content Interoperability
Another promise of moving to Magnolia's v. 4.5 is an upgrade to document sharing based on the new CMIS open standard (Content Management Interoperability Services), co-sponsored by Magnolia.
CMIS access to Sharepoint data files in Magnolia v. 4.5
This abstraction layer uses web protocols to decouple web services and content, and is administered by the OASIS standards body (CMIS v. 1.0 standard). Magnolia 4.5 will also support Spring developers with its Blossom 2.0 framework and will run on JCR 2.0.
The company also promises new page editing tools and a new Template API with full support for Content Repository API 2.0 that offers enhanced security including activation upgrades. Look for the 4.5 upgrade towards the end of this month.