Overview

This blog article is one of a series of articles by Priocept that provide introductory training material for the Magnolia system. There are further articles on Magnolia and training; see also Getting Started with Magnolia CMS.

The Magnolia Publishing Mechanism

The publishing mechanism used by Magnolia CMS revolves around the concept of a server used for creating, editing and previewing content, available only to a limited group of users and known as the authoring instance, and one or more publicly accessible servers which operate in a read-only style, serving content over the web and known as public instances.

The Configuration

The simplest possible setup is shown below where one authoring instance pushes content updates to one public instance.

When multiple public instances are used, this is not necessarily so that they will host different content but simply so that the website can better handle a high workload. There is still only one controlling source.

Authors, editors and anyone else involved in the creation and management processes of a Magnolia-powered website use the authoring instance to create and edit new content. A workflow system, provided as soon as Magnolia is first activated, then ensures the right users are informed about these updates so they can approve them. Once approved, the authoring instance contacts each public instance in turn and pushes the updates out to them.

This separation ensures that the public sites are kept running with the correct content while updates are made, revised, discussed and previewed behind closed doors and are still running when these updates are made. There is no mandatory downtime.

Performance

To help reduce load on a public instance server, multiple public instances can be sent content from the same authoring instance. This setup is shown below in a system that would provide exactly the same content from multiple public instances.