Release notes for Magnolia CMS 6.0

Magnolia 6 reinforces our position as a CMS with a strong focus on usability and an app-based work pattern. The user interface has been completely transformed into a modern-looking administration environment in which rich functionality marries simple yet elegant visual style. Found on every page of the new Magnolia interface, the Find bar offers powerful full-text search across all your content, no matter the app, and can be used as a starting point for many tasks. Combined with our neural network-based AI engine, Magnolia uses the power of deep-learning to rank your search results

Magnolia 6 provides two image recognition services. Image recognition detects subjects in your photos and tags photos accordingly. Automated tagging reduces manual labor and makes it easier for practitioners to find relevant image assets.

This release delivers developer preview versions for some exciting changes:

• Content Types - Start projects faster. Create Magnolia apps faster. Let editors enter content before you even have a website.
• Magnolia UI framework - Better implementations leveraging the power and improvements of Vaadin 8.

We encourage developers to try out our preview versions and send us feedback and suggestions.

Changes for authors

Overhauled user interface

Inspired by traditional Swiss graphic design, the user interface has been overhauled to provide a light, modern and relaxing look and feel. Users are guided in their interactions with the product with meaningful navigation elements, clear lines, boxes and forms and the new Find Bar in its core (1). 

The legacy M5 trinity icons (App Launcher, Pulse and Favorites) are replaced by a central navigation bar present on all pages. Tasks and Messages (3) to the right of the bar provide a visual prompt for users: a green dot for new notifications, a yellow dot for tasks in progress, a red dot for failed tasks. The App Launcher can be accessed by clicking on the   icon (2). 

 We provide a temporary way of switching to the legacy UI in case you have display issues with your custom apps. 

Powerful search with the Find Bar

The Find Bar is the new heart of the Magnolia user interface. You will find it on every page of the new Magnolia interface and can use it as a starting point for many tasks. It offers full-text search across all your content, no matter the app.  Find Bar searches and adapts its results in real-time while you type. Then you can use the different filters to drill down into the results. 

All JCR-based data, from both native Magnolia apps and your custom apps, is searched by default. Developers can also integrate any REST-compliant data source to be able to search through content that's not stored in Magnolia. For example, plug in your Flickr images or your company's CRM system.  

Use the Magnolia Periscope Result Ranker module (EE Pro) to get even better search results as our AI-powered system learns from your behavior and preferences. 

The Magnolia Image Recognition module (EE Pro) also combines with the Find bar to automatically tag images with content tags that can then be searched like any other content. 

MGNLUI-4686, MGNLPER

AI-based search result ranking

The Magnolia Periscope Result Ranker module provides the neural network-based search result ranking functionality used by the Find Bar.  Magnolia suggests top hits and ranks all your search results based on what it has learned from your previous search patterns and preferences. 

MLEARN 

Image recognition

Magnolia image recognition is a neural network-based feature that extends the search capabilities of the Find Bar by automatically recognizing and tagging the content of image assets, allowing you to get more relevant results when searching. The feature can be configured to use:

• A local image recognition service, which utilizes the ImageNet image database, Deeplearning4j algorithms and the VGG-16 image recognition model.
• The Amazon Rekognition Image service, providing a more advanced image recognition service capable of generating a more refined set of image tags.

Developers can use the ImageRecogniser interface to integrate the image recognition feature with any other image recognition service. 

IMGREC

Changes for developers

Content Types

DEVELOPER PREVIEW

Use the Magnolia Content Types module to define the content models of your project in Magnolia.

A Magnolia content type is a formal definition for a type of content in Magnolia including the properties the type may contain and its relationships to other types of content. A content type is configured in a content type definition that includes the data source definition and the model definition.

Content type items can be managed by a content app. The content can be embedded into web pages or served via REST in a headless approach.

Developers can define content types in light modules on a running Magnolia system without redeploying the WAR file of your Magnolia instances and without restarting the instance or a module. This makes it a perfect approach if you have a Magnolia Cloud subscription package.

Example of a content type definition:

datasource:
  workspace: tourguides
  namespaces:
    mt: https://www.magnolia-travel.com/jcr/1.0/mt
  autoCreate: true
  
model:
  nodeType: mt:tourGuide
  properties:
    - name: birthday
      type: Date
    - name: gender
    - name: shortBio

!with-type:tourGuide
name: tourGuides-app	

MGNLCT

New UI framework

DEVELOPER PREVIEW

We have rewritten parts of our UI framework, particularly the content-app framework, in Magnolia 6. While we mostly keep the same concepts, we developed better implementations of them using the power and the improvements of Vaadin 8. The new implementation simplifies app mechanics and configuration. Apps use much less Vaadin custom code, enabling a cleaner and faster customization.

Magnolia 6 contains both the previous UI framework implementation used in Magnolia 5.7 and the new implementation. You can use either. Your apps continue to work without any changes but they will have the newly redesigned look and feel. We provide backward compatibility at runtime and compilation levels.

For further information, see Changes in the Magnolia UI framework 6.0.

Tomcat 9 server configuration with relaxed query chars

Tomcat 9 is less tolerant regarding special characters compared to some previous versions. To bring back the same support for special characters as it was on Tomcat 8 — for instance to query the Delivery endpoint API with filters — we have added the [, ], and | characters to the relaxedQueryChars attribute on the Connector element in the server.xml configuration file.

MGNLTOMCAT-6

Fixed full-text search of documents

Indexing and full-text search of documents works as expected again after upgrading third-party dependencies for Apache POI and Apache Commons Compress.

MAGNOLIA-7398

Publishing only specific paths

Receivers can be configured to publish only a specific path in a workspace. For example, the following receiver configuration publishes only the /specificPath path of the website workspace and ignores everything else:

• WorkspaceDefinition properties fromPath and toPath are set to /specificPath.
• The workspace property is set to website and the excluded property to false. 

PUBLISHING-39

Third-party library updates

This release comes with various third-party library updates. All changes are managed via BOM for third-party modules. If you manage your bundles via Maven using the BOM, all updates are handled automatically.

• Vaadin 8.5.2  (BUILD-326)
  
  • Updated in all modules that use the UI.

• Apache Commons Compress 1.14 (MAGNOLIA-7398)

• Bouncy Castle encryption libraries 1.60 (BUILD-327)

• jQuery 3.3.1 (MGNLUI-4727)
  
  • This jQuery update only concerns the Admincentral. jQuery 3.3.1 for Admincentral is included via the Magnolia UI project.  If you rely on jQuery for the front-end, for instance in a template, this change does not affect your front-end code. We also added a jQuery Migration Plugin to facilitate the update to jQuery 3.
• Lombok 1.18.4 (BUILD-325)

• Java Streaming API for XML (MGNLGS-145)

  • We removed javax.xml.stream:stax-api and  org.apache.geronimo.specs:geronimo-stax-api_1.0_spec from our builds. Both artifacts enable "Java Streaming API for XML" as described in JSR-173. The functionality is provided by the JDK since version 1.6.

Deprecations

JavaServer Pages

JavaServer Pages (JSP) functionality has been deprecated with this release. JSP technology is now generally considered outdated. You may still use JSP in Magnolia 5.7 and earlier versions but in Magnolia 6.0 all support for it has been dropped, including the Templating JSP module.

JSP deprecation also means that JSP is no longer available as a page renderer. Additionally, we have stopped including the Apache Standard Taglibs in our bundles.

If you rely on JSP and need an alternative, see the Deprecations page for some suggestions.

Google Sitemap module

With this release we also deprecate the Google Sitemap module and app. The module provided very narrow functionality and was not suitable for complex sites. We recommend using a Solr-based sitemap instead; see the Deprecations page for details.

Others

If you are upgrading from an earlier version, read the Upgrading to Magnolia 6.0.x page first and check the Known issues section on it.

Security advisory

Customers should pay attention to the CWE-502: Deserialization of Untrusted Data issue even though Magnolia is not directly affected by it. For more details, see JIRA ticket: MGNLUI-4790.

We have fixed several other security issues with this release. We keep details of this kind of fix private in line with our Security Policy. Contact our Support team if you need more information.

Known issues

Editing Roles in the Security app

When editing Roles in the Security app, it is impossible to manually edit the ACL node path field on the Access control lists tab. The view of the field is obstructed by the incorrect position of the Choose button. This issue will be fixed in one of the next maintenance releases.

MGNLUI-4785

Documentation screenshot updates

Some of the screenshots in this documentation still show the legacy M5 UI. Please bear with us as we work to update them.

Changelog

See the 6.0 changelog for all the changes. 

Updated modules

• Barebones Magnolia Tomcat Bundle 1.1.2
• Categorization 2.6.1
• CLI npm 3.0.4
• Community Edition 6.0
• Contacts 1.7.0
• Content Editor 1.3
• Content Tags 1.2
• Content Translation Support 2.2.1
• Content Types 1.0
• DAM 2.5
• Definitions app 1.2
• Demo Projects 1.4
• Enterprise Edition 6.0
• Form 2.5.1
• Groovy 2.8
• Image Recognition 1.0
• Imaging 3.4.2
• Jcr Tools 1.3
• License 1.7
• Log Tools 1.1.2
• Magnolia 6.0
• Machine Learning 1.0
• Multisite 1.3.5
• Pages 6.0
• Periscope 1.0
• Personalization 1.7
• Privacy 1.1
• Public User Registration 2.7.1
• Publishing 1.0.6
• Resources 2.6.3
• REST Client 1.5.3
• RSS Aggregator 2.6.1
• Task Management 1.2.5
• Templating Samples 6.0
• Third-party library BOM 6.0
• Tools 1.9.1
• UI 6.0
• Vaadin Compatibility Addons 1.2
• Websphere 1.5
• Workflow 5.7.2

Acknowledgements

The Magnolia team would also like to thank everyone who reported issues, contributed patches, or simply commented on issues for this release. Your continued interest helps us make Magnolia better. Special thanks go to: Olaf Kozlowski, Pierre Sandrin, Rajeev Singh and Siegried Zach.