Magnolia 5.7 reached extended end of life on May 31, 2022. Support for this branch is limited, see End-of-life policy. Please note that to cover the extra maintenance effort, this EEoL period is a paid extension in the life of the branch. Customers who opt for the extended maintenance will need a new license key to run future versions of Magnolia 5.7. If you have any questions or to subscribe to the extended maintenance, please get in touch with your local contact at Magnolia.

This page contains some background (conceptual) information about activation, that is how content gets activated (published) from an author instance to a public instance. Activation is an older implementation inherited from the 5.5 branch. Activation can still be used but is less transparent in terms of module structure than its refactored successor – publishing. Activation is installed by the Activation module and extended by the Transactional Activation module (in Magnolia EE). 

How activation works

On the author instance

A Syndicator collects the content that needs to be activated. It stores the content into an ActivationContent object. The default BaseSyndicatorImpl can activate content to any public instance that is configured as a subscriber. The configuration details of each subscriber are held in a Subscriber Java bean at runtime. When you trigger an activation command, the syndicator creates an ActivationContent object and sends it to each subscriber. There are two variations of ActivationContent : current content and versioned content. In this context, Content is defined by the filtering Rule used to collect all the child nodes that are still considered to be part of the content for any given activation.

On the public instance

The Activation filter receives the content. The filter acts on the incoming request and saves the data into the repository.

Other aspects

Authentication and security

Activation is authenticated using public-key cryptography. The authentication configuration for activation is stored in /server/activation , see Activation security for more on this.

Recursive and non-recursive activation

Magnolia supports two methods of activating content:

  • Non-recursive, which activates only the selected node and its properties.
  • Recursive, which activates the selected node, its properties and its children.
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