First of all, Sceneric congratulates the Magnolia team for running such a great event – Definitely worthwhile, and we look forward to next year’s.

It was good to see so many different groups represented, the whole range through users, customers, integrators (even competitors ?!?!).

Whilst it’s nice to see all these people, from a business perspective it represents a whole lot more. In the cliched ‘fractured’ CMS market place, it is essential for Sceneric to be able to demonstrate to potential customers the depth, reach and commitment of the Magnolia community.
Being able to directly speak to different members of the community and understand what they have been doing, allows us to speak to customers with more confidence
about not only what could be achieved, but more importantly , what has been achieved.

Obviously, customers don’t want to feel like they are the guinea pigs for a weakly supported fledgling 1.0 product, therefore having the knowledge of and confidently be able to refer to similar projects, provides an invaluable tool for the promotion of Magnolia.

Up until now, we knew generally of different groups utilising Magnolia in a variety of different ways, but this conference has provided a focal point for the pooling and and sharing of the details of those different projects.

I’m confident that we’ll all look back at this conference as another significant step towards Magnolia further establishing itself as a main player in the CMS space.

As well as being System Integrators, Sceneric also have a Software Development arm, currently developing products for the Financial Services industry.

Therefore, at the Magnolia Conference, it was interesting to see the proposition the guys from NRG Edge are putting together. They are currently building an online banking solution, the Marketing Portal aspect of which is driven by Magnolia.

We like this on a number of levels.

Firstly, it’s another great example of how Magnolia is being used outside of it’s ‘comfort zone’ web CMS area, it’s really encouraging to see an intermediary organisation making a commitment like this to the Magnolia solution. It all acts as further validation as to the quality of the Magnolia product for when we find ourselves speaking to potential clients.

Further, for us maybe in the future, it gives us some ideas about how we can leverage our knowledge of the Magnolia solution within our own offerings, providing the means for clients to publish and maintain products, brands and web content through a single holistic experience for both authors and users.

Plenty of food for thought.

So, I’ve seen it on the Magnolia website, but this was the first time I’d seen in detail the On Air solution.

I’m not the editor of a large scale Broadcast website, so may not be the best person to comment, however, from Peter’s demonstration, it was possible to see the ease with which the Rich Media publication process could be managed.

I can only assume this is exactly the kind of ease of use that will endear it to time pressed journalists – It was  very simple to operate, it was very ‘Magnolia’.

As well as being impressed by the product, was was also great to see was the fact that Magnolia was being integrated with another impressive solution.
It’s this kind of approach that demonstrates that Magnolia exists as more than ‘just’ a Web CMS – It demonstrates the capability of magnolia to be transformed from a generic product to one that supports very specific industry verticals.

As Systems Integrators ourselves, it acts as a great standard bearer for the potential of Magnolia to be integrated with other products and systems.

Congratulations to the Magnolia and futureLAB teams.

A few months ago we created a proof of concept to access the Magnolia JCR container using Webservices so that a PHP based site we were building could access new items within an Enterprise Class CMS.  It turned out to be remarkably easy:

To integrate Axis 1.4 into Magnolia:

1. Download the Axis distribution
2. Copy the jars into the magnoliaAuthor and magnoliaPublic WEB-INF/lib directories
3. Copy the servlet declarations from the axis web.xml into the magnolia web.xml in both auth and pub
4. Open AdminCentral and browse to Configuration
5. Open server/filters/servlets and copy log4j node, rename to AxisServlet
6. Open AxisServlet/mappings/–magnolia-pages–/patten and change to /services/*
7. Change AxisServlet/servletClass to org.apache.axis.transport.http.AxisServlet
8. Change AxisServlet/servletName to AxisServet (to match the web.xml servletname)

If you now deploy a class through jws or wsdl methods (by coping the classes, wsdl and .wsdd files) into Magnolia you will be able to access it through <host>/<maginstance>/services/ServiceName?wsdl

You might want to bypass Magnolia security during development, to do that:

1. Open AdminCentral and browse to Configuration
2. Open server/filters/uriSecurity/bypasses
3. Create a new content node “services”
4. Create 2 new data nodes; “services/class” with data info.magnolia.voting.voters.URIStartsWithVoter and “services/pattern” with data /services

For our demo, we simply queried the API for a “text” content node based on a path that was passed into the method:

public String getContent (String name) throws Exception {
String returnContent = new String();
returnContent="";
try {
//get the current context
Context context = MgnlContext.getSystemContext();
//get a hierarchy manager and lookup the content node
HierarchyManager mgr = context.getHierarchyManager(ContentRepository.WEBSITE);
Content uriContent = mgr.getContent(name);
if(uriContent==null){
//oops
returnContent+=" content is null";
} else {
//get the data collection and return the text node
for(Iterator i = uriContent.getNodeDataCollection().iterator(); i.hasNext();) {
NodeData nodeData = (NodeData) i.next();
String nodeName = nodeData.getName();
if (nodeName.equals("text")) {
returnContent=nodeData.getString();
}
}
}
} catch (RepositoryException e) {
throw new Exception(e.getMessage());
}
return returnContent;
}

Axis presents this with the following WSDL:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<wsdl:definitions targetNamespace="http://test.sceneric.com" xmlns:apachesoap="http://xml.apache.org/xml-soap" xmlns:impl="http://test.sceneric.com" xmlns:intf="http://test.sceneric.com" xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/" xmlns:wsdlsoap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<!--WSDL created by Apache Axis version: 1.4
Built on Apr 22, 2006 (06:55:48 PDT)-->
 <wsdl:types>
  <schema elementFormDefault="qualified" targetNamespace="http://test.sceneric.com" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
   <element name="getContent">
    <complexType>
     <sequence>
      <element name="name" type="xsd:string"/>
     </sequence>

    </complexType>
   </element>
   <element name="getContentResponse">
    <complexType>
     <sequence>
      <element name="getContentReturn" type="xsd:string"/>
     </sequence>
    </complexType>
   </element>

  </schema>
 </wsdl:types>

   <wsdl:message name="getContentResponse">

      <wsdl:part element="impl:getContentResponse" name="parameters"/>

   </wsdl:message>

   <wsdl:message name="getContentRequest">

      <wsdl:part element="impl:getContent" name="parameters"/>

   </wsdl:message>

   <wsdl:portType name="TestWebService">

      <wsdl:operation name="getContent">

         <wsdl:input message="impl:getContentRequest" name="getContentRequest"/>

         <wsdl:output message="impl:getContentResponse" name="getContentResponse"/>

      </wsdl:operation>

   </wsdl:portType>

   <wsdl:binding name="TestWebServiceSoapBinding" type="impl:TestWebService">

      <wsdlsoap:binding style="document" transport="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http"/>

      <wsdl:operation name="getContent">

         <wsdlsoap:operation soapAction=""/>

         <wsdl:input name="getContentRequest">

            <wsdlsoap:body use="literal"/>

         </wsdl:input>

         <wsdl:output name="getContentResponse">

            <wsdlsoap:body use="literal"/>

         </wsdl:output>

      </wsdl:operation>

   </wsdl:binding>

   <wsdl:service name="TestWebServiceService">

      <wsdl:port binding="impl:TestWebServiceSoapBinding" name="TestWebService">

         <wsdlsoap:address location="http://localhost:8800/magnoliaAuthor/services/TestWebService"/>

      </wsdl:port>

   </wsdl:service>

</wsdl:definitions>

and an example of this in action is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<soapenv:Envelope>
−
<soapenv:Body>
−
<getContentResponse>
−
<ns1:getContentReturn>
<p>yadda yadda yadda</p>
</ns1:getContentReturn>
</getContentResponse>
</soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>

Of course, a twist to this approach would be to wrap the JSP rendering with Axis to take advantage of the tag libraries. We tested this with PHP 5’s SOAP Client and successfully read data from Magnolia.  In a production environment we would obviously use XPath or the Query Builder in order to search the repository, and return more complex results.

You can see a video demonstration of this here: http://www.sceneric.com/index.php?page=magnolia-web-services

Some things in life are just the “right” thing to do.  Take implementing a content managed website.  In the early days of content management systems (CMS), there was often no division of content from presentation.  This meant that changing branding & look and feel or re-using content across trading divisions was difficult and costly.  Also, the content was only available as HTML, there was no ability to make the content available through any other mechanism without considerable extra work.

However, even these systems could be implemented correctly, separating content from presentation and utilising content tagging to allow web experiences to be personalised.  Sceneric has built a number of award winning websites forcing this separation and providing the content as discrete, tagged items of information.  This very much the building blocks of the semantic web and can be demonstrated by Friends Provident’s news items being made available as an RSS feed with only 1 hours development, the first FTSE100 company to offer this service. Sceneric have published these guidelines as best practice which can be downloaded here.

This approach has been formalised by all modern CMS projects, in the JSR170 Java standard as used by Magnolia, LiveRay, Alfresco and Oracle CMS, and in the templated approach of Joomla, Drupal, CMS Made Simple in the PHP and Python arena.  In fact, Microsoft’s Sharepoint is also an excellent implementation of this idea.

The key point is that project implementation can be just as rapid and cost the same to produce a platform that seperates content and presentation as to rush something into production that will cost orders of magnitude more to fix in future.