Two of the Priocept team, Chris and Adam, went to Basel last week to get trained up as Magnolia developers. Here’s a quick report-back from them.

Spending the week at Magnolia’s head office, alongside the Rhine in Basel we went through the whole range of Magnolia development under the guidance of Christian Ringele, a member of the Magnolia development team.

We started with some of the basics about the internals of Magnolia and Java Content Repository (JCR) including how to configure specific page and paragraph types and how to combine these content items. For example, if we have configured a blog article page type to contain the text of a blog post along with headers  and metadata about the author or the publishing date we can then add paragraphs of text to the page to contain the actual content.

Building on this we looked at defining dialogs to allow us to enter the data required for this blog article or the paragraphs within it. This introduced the crucial Magnolia template map which we referred to every day afterwards.

In Magnolia CMS a dialog is a web form relating to a template and they are generally both defined at the same time. The dialog contains the appropriate user inputs, including a CKEditor pane for WYSIWYG editing, and allows for restriction, validation and repository browsing for the creation of navigation and download links.

With these basic topics well covered we were able to jump in to some more advanced and more interesting topics, which we’ll cover in later posts.

Find more information on Magnolia CMS here.