The second release candidate is ready. We made various improvements and fixes. The iPad version uses now touch-hold for drag and drop to not mixup with scrolling gestures. We were also able to chase down a memory leak and put a protection mechanism in place to avoid additional logins before the system reaches it’s limits.
Please give it a try!
We’ve built the first release candidate, and you can get it and try it out here: Magnolia CE 5.0 RC1
The most relevant changes since Beta 3 are:
Now we only make small design changes or fix serious problems. Other changes are postponed to 5.1 (before the conference) or to a maintenance releases (5.0.x) right after the final 5.0 release.
Before we begin the final stages, we have released the Beta 2 version.
We made various improvements: Worked on UX topics like the page editor, context menu and keyboard shortcuts, but had also a special focus on the iPad version which we polished dramatically. And to make sure we ship not less features as we had in 4.5 we added the deletion process and version/restore.
All that is summarised and demonstrated in the following video.
Now we have 4 weeks left until the release date. We are getting exited 
In the last iterations we focused again on features and are happy that we manage to reach the next level. We are now beta. Get it now!
The following few videos demonstrate the most important achievements.
Content Apps
We were talking about content apps a lot. Check out how they work and how they can be configured.
If you want to explore on your own just follow our step by step tutorial: My first Content App Tutorial
Favorites
Now just add your favorite locations in the application. Ever wanted to save bookmarks to a node in the configuration tree? At your service!
Workflow/Message Views
The workflow now communicates with the Pulse. The message view and possible actions can be defined for each workflow step. This opens the door wide open to implement any kind of processes and makes your content alive.
Notification and UiContext
Guide your users by showing notifications and confirmations. Its easy, just use the app developers best friends: the app, sub app or UI context. Open dialogs modal to the entire UI, the app or just the sub app.
Multilingual Authoring
Multilingual authoring itself is not new, but now you can choose the content’s language in every dialog.
On to Beta 2
Now we hunt down the details to make the new Magnolia snappy, handy and convincing. If you currently miss some transitions, keyboard shortcuts or think that the configuration tree could work better, these are the things that we will attack now.
Greetings from the Dev Team!
We shipped Alpha 4. This time we haven’t added shiny features but worked on the existing features and made the bundle ready for a final release.
And what is next? We are working on Beta1 and focus again more on features
So you can expect some new shiny videos in a month Go go Johnny go!
Alpha2 is the latest milestone release of our upcoming Magnolia 5.0. You can download the CE bundle from our Nexus server.
Here’s a catch-up on the latest improvements:
PS: Some of us will present Alpha 3 at the Magnolia Amplify Conference in Miami. CU there!
In September at the Magnolia CMS conference we demoed the Magnolia 5 preview, revealing the new UI and its interaction pattern. We showed how to work with Apps and how collaboration works via The Pulse. Now, 3 months later, after tackling no less than 420 tasks (change-log), we are shipping the Alpha1 release.
All this is demonstrated and summarized in the following Video:
Now if you are curious, just download and try it!
We could endlessly talk about technical details but the following are the most noteworthy improvements since the preview:
App API: The framework is vastly improved. You can make apps with just a few lines of code.
DAM: The new hub for media types is now integrated it into the STK. This means that you can do basic image operations (such as cropping) and to navigate simply using the thumbnail view.
Configuration by Code: Magnolia CMS can now be configured by code. We expect this to be extremely useful during project development as it will make deployment and updates much easier.
–> see details
Meta Data: Replacing the MetaData sub nodes with JCR mixins has removed one of the biggest performance issues. You can now use specific mixins like mgnl:renderable or mgnl:activatable.
–> see details
CKEditor: The latest CKEditor means you get rich content editing. The new integration is based on custom plugins and allows for the addition of other functionality in a Vaadin friendly way.
–> see details
Old AdminCentral: It sounds easier than it actually was. Getting rid of the old AdminCentral meant having to write a new Security App, create a basic Configuration App and integrate the old Tool pages into the new UI. In addition, the Maven project structure is restructured into an independent Main and UI project.
User interactions: One of the biggest changes is that now you can open a tab per item in all content apps. (This is the same pattern already being used in the pages app.) The result is a much better user experience, providing room for even more actions. On top, each of the tabs can be bookmarked.
And what’s next?
We target an Alpha 2 release in January to improve and finalize the existing code base. We will be finalizing the essential API so that real development can begin.
When will it be final? We have stripped 5.0 down to what is really essential to replace the Magnolia 4 series. We are positive there will be Beta ready in early Spring. Additional new features will be shipped with successive releases of M5. You probably agree that we don’t want to wait much longer for the 5.0 final, right? Once this is out we can innovate at a much higher pace! I am sure of that
While we are working on M5 we have not forgotten to target the migration issues.
First of all we started to polish the documentation, visualized the process and restructured the documentation so that each sub-step of the process can be followed
We also wrote a concept about how we think the migration process should be implemented to be less challenging.
To see some additional information as well the current status you can watch the following video.
We successfully finished our sprint 7. If you want to try the resulting work you can downloaded the alpha1-s7 release from nexus.
But you can also see the improvements by watching some of the videos we created at the end of the sprint to communicate our status to the interested technical audience.
We worked on the front-end and improved the snappiness of the UI
.. and we approached search
… and sorting
… and worked on configuring the system by code