Repositories

A content repository is a high-level information management system that is a superset of traditional data repositories. It implements content services such as:

• Hierarchical, structured and unstructured content
• Granular content access and access control
• Node types, property types (text, number, date, binary)
• Queries (XPath, SQL)
• Import and export
• Referential integrity
• Versioning
• Observation
• Locking
• Clustering
• Multiple persistence models

A content repository can store text and binary data (images, documents). You don't need to worry about how the data is stored. The repository provides a standardized way to store and retrieve it whether it resides in a traditional database or in a file system.

Magnolia has one repository, magnolia, which in turn contains several workspaces. There is a workspace for storing website content, another for user accounts, third for configuration and so on. In JCR terms these are all workspaces. In Magnolia terms we sometimes refer to them as repositories for historical reasons.