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Few months back, Me and a colleague of mine (Ganesh Gembali) came up with an idea of writing a book on Magnolia CMS - a Java based CMS.

Well!, two potential International publishers after rigorous reviews & mails said, they dont see big market for Magnolia CMS books compared to books on Drupal & Mamboo.

We are bit sad, but atleast we thought we would share the table of contents that we attempted for. Please feel free to use it for future book writings on Magnolia.
They very much appreciated by quality of the table of contents and the snippets.

Table of contents

 

 

Chapter 1 - Introduction to Content Management System

 

  1. What is Content
  2. Why content should be managed?
  3. How content is managed by CMS
  4. Difference between CMS and custom web applications
  5. List of existing content management system tools
  6. Summary

 

Chapter 2 – Getting started with Magnolia CMS

 

  1. Overview
  2. Installation
    1. Simple war based installation
    2. Maven 2 based build and install
  3. Installation Trouble shooting
  4. Understanding how Magnolia CMS works
  5. Creating a Hello world web page
  6. Modules of Magnolia CMS
  7. Directory structure of Magnolia CMS
  8. Features of Magnolia CMS
  9. Summary

 

Chapter 3 – Creating a simple website with Magnolia CMS

 

  1. Difference between static website and template driven website
  2. Building a website layout
  3. Choosing a template and adding contents
  4. Publishing the website
  5. Summary

 

Chapter 4 – JCR and Magnolia CMS

 

  1. Introduction to Java Content Repository (JCR)
  2. Component of JCR
  3. Features of JCR
  4. Repository structure
  5. How Magnolia uses Jackrabbit - JCR Implementation
  6. Repository structure and Node types in Magnolia
  7. Summary

 

Chapter 5 – Administration of Magnolia CMS

 

  1. Introduction
  2. User Management
  3. Backing up Contents
  4. Resource management
  5. Configuring Repository with various databases
  6. Migrating Contents
  7. Configuring subscribers
  8. Summary

 

Chapter 6 – Creating Magnolia Templates

 

  1. Introduction
  2. Understanding the Configuration module
  3. Creating a page template
  4. Creating a dialog
    1. Understanding Dialog controls
    2. Using different controls
  5. Creating a paragraph template
  6. Testing and using the templating components
  7. Summary

 

Chapter 7 - Templating Resources

 

  1. Using JSPX for templating
  2. Using Magnolia Tag libraries
    1. CMS – Core Tag Library
    2. CMSU – Utility Tag Library
  3. Using Magnolia Java API
  4. Improving sample website
  5. Summary

 

Chapter 8 – Advanced Templating

 

  1. Modifying existing modules
  2. Content Aggregator
  3. Creating RSS feeds
  4. Pagination
  5. Form Handling
  6. Multipart form handling
  7. Email service
  8. Generating sitemap
  9. Dynamic page linking
  10. Summary

 

Chapter 9 - Advanced Topics

 

  1. Configuring the Workflow
  2. Configuring FckEditor
  3. Custom Dialogs
  4. Custom Controls
  5. Internationalization
  6. Customizing admin interface
  7. JCR Browser
  8. Repository querying
  9. Summary

 

Appendix A:

 

  1. Integrating with Postgressql / MySQL
  2. Externalizing repository properties
  3. Bootstrap based migration
  4. Using the sample application from the CD

 


Topics idea box that may or may not be moved to ToC:

 

  • Security Features
  • JSR173 API for data retrieval/manipulation
  • Pros / Cons of Magnolia vs Other
  • Additional features of Magnolia Enterprise Edition
  • Depoyment/Administration of multiple sites through single Magnolia Server ?
  • Metadata,
  • Content Types,
  • Workflow,
  • Authorizations and access control,
  • Personalization,
  • Content lifecycle


Too bad, mamboo drupal & al are php based and i stay away from php... I am desperatly trying to find a good book on java / CMS and only find about openCMS, not sure if this is JCR compliant. I agree that Magnolia is still new/unmature, maybe covering larger such as JCR, JSR-170, CMS products would be more sellable ?
Thanks for sharing this. I understand the publishers; the market for the mass-market systems is bigger and mainstream publishers look at the mass market only. However, the need for such a book is there and if you wish to sell it you don't have to go through a publisher. A joint deal with Magnolia itself would be much more lucrative anyways, as you will not get more than say 3$ from a main stream publisher per book, so you need to sell an awful lot to make it worth the effort. At the same time, most of the potential readers will visit the Magnolia home page and could order it via a fulfillment or print-to-order shop. I have also contacted Ganesh about it, so if you are still interested we might be interested as well ;-)
Magnolia is neither new (happy 5th birthday this month) nor immature. It is an amazing marriage between usability and enterprise readiness, and our impressive and quickly growing list of high-profile clients proves that. Regarding JCR-170 book - that's a different topic and will be rather useless for normal Magnolia users this proposed book was aiming at.
A demonstration of Magnolia was given at the Orange County Java User Group in November. I was very impressed by what Magnolia can do. You have to make sure you cover Workflow in the book. An approval workflow is important in today’s corporate web sites. Why anybody would use anything but Magnolia for web site creation and maintenance is beyond me. Maybe you can practice you writing skills and put a chapter or two out on the web. If you decide to write a book on a different subject the feedback may be helpful.
I'Hi, I'm using Magnolia CMS about a two weeks, but I can't find some resources that a I can apply, and I get some errors that I can't face, in the content of this book I find the topics that I need for my own need, Can you help me to getting started with this CMS, I dont know how to integrate Postgres SQL with Magnolia, I don´t find information on internet... :( I'm using Sun Application Server 9.2 (Glassfish) and I can´t activate elements from the admin console, seems that is an error with the configuration of the subscribers... but anywhere I find enought information even the Magnolia web site! The documentation is tooo poor... It's a shame... Cal you help me? Thaks for your reply, mi email is: midireccion6@gmail.com
Daniel, subscribe to the user-list at the Magnolia site for help. See http://documentation.magnolia-cms.com/
@Daniel I just wrote a blog post on the same subject: http://www.danielhonig.com/gravl/steamtrain/2008/11/22/setting-up-magnolia-cms-with-glassfish-and-postgressql.html
Why not write it anyway? Maybe you could sell it online as a PDF.
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