Announcing Magnolia 5.4

We’re happy to announce the release of 5.4, the new version of Magnolia CMS.

With 5.4, our focus is on you, the developer. We’ve worked with you over the last year to identify the rough edges that got in your way or slowed you down – and come up with some elegant solutions. With 5.4 creating websites with Magnolia is faster and easier for all developers. We’ve simplified development by making it more consistent, and by removing things that were not necessary. New Magnolia developers will get up to speed faster because there is less to learn, development obstacles have been removed, and new documentation covers key topics for beginners. And the new Light Development approach means that front-end developers can create Magnolia projects with no Java knowledge or tooling.

Light Development
In combination, two new features (YAML configuration & Unified resource loading) enable a new simple development style for Magnolia projects: Light Development. With 5.4, developers without Java knowledge or even a Java development environment can create or contribute to Magnolia projects. Simply place all your resources, including configuration files in special directories on the file system – and they will be loaded by Magnolia. No Jars required. We refer to these directories as Light Modules. Light development is designed to work seamlessly with standard Java-based Magnolia development. Use a mixture of Light development and Java development as appropriate for your team and project.

Curious to try it out? Get your feet wet in this 1 hour tutorial: Hello Magnolia

Magnolia Templating Essentials (MTE) & the new Travel Demo
With MTE we are providing a new foundation for your projects. Based on our experience and your feedback, we are creating a small pallette of flexible functions, models and templates – rather than the large library of more rigid components that some of you know from MTE’s predecessor – the Standard Templating Kit. We are creating MTE with a focus on the rapid development of front-end technology. It is designed to be supporting & complimentary to these technologies, rather than competing with them. The great features of the Standard Templating Kit, such as Sites, have been integrated into the rest of our platform.

The new Travel Demo shows the value of Magnolia’s features in a realistic context. For developers, the project shows best practices for working with MTE and the other 5.4 features.

Several other important developments in 5.4
Campaign Publisher – Manage and publish your marketing campaigns as a whole. Dynamic Page Caching add-on – Cache static content on dynamic pages.
Personalization is now available to Enterprise Edition Standard customers.

View the 5.4 page on our website.

Or the full 5.4 release notes with links to documentation.

Want to learn more?
Here are some relevent presentations from the 2015 Magnolia Conference in Basel:

Product keynote