Open Source giant casts its vote on CMS

BASEL, SWITZERLAND: Magnolia, the Open Source content management system (CMS) that delivers simplicity on an enterprise scale, has been chosen by JBoss.org as the platform to support its new website infrastructure. With over 40 different open source middleware projects to host, Magnolia will play a key part in building the project websites for use by the community.

With such a large number of sites to support and the prospect of more in the future, JBoss.org leader Mark Newton was encountering a challenge common to many larger organizations. They needed one single, scalable web infrastructure with the flexibility to allow project teams to run their own affairs and develop sites suited to their own individual needs and identities.

"It is important that our project teams are not restrained by the CMS and that they have free reign to exercise their own individuality and control of their own web space," Newton explains. "At the same time we want a solution that is simple to use and easy to extend. Magnolia is the perfect solution. Each project has complete control over the look and feel of their site and can even choose to use their own domain in place of jboss.org if they wish to maintain their own identity. Having the ability to do this but still have all the projects run on the same back-end system is critical for our requirements."

JBoss.org currently uses its own in-house CMS to run the site. However, with the increasingly complex functionality required, maintenance and development of this system detracts from their core business.

"We need a reliable Open Source alternative from a partner we can trust, and it is vital that they offer a commercial support package," continues Newton. "Magnolia simply fits all of our requirements."

Given the highly distributed nature of the project developers it is also vital for JBoss.org that its choice of CMS offers an intuitive interface that minimizes the management burden and the need for training.

"Everything can be done remotely," Newton explains. "Users with the correct permissions simply login to their site, navigate to the page they wish to edit and select the right section, before being offered a set of logical choices to add, remove or edit the content. Likewise, administration can also be carried out remotely using a browser."

"For Magnolia, this is a massive vote of confidence in our technology from one of the most highly qualified judges out there," concludes Boris Kraft, chief technical officer at Magnolia. "As a part of Red Hat and with its own large community, JBoss.org has access to a wealth of Open Source expertise. Its decision to use Magnolia, given the organization's insight into all areas of Open Source Software, is one of the highest implicit recommendations we could hope for."