Finnotype

Magnolia Conference 2013 has left town. Time to sum up the results. I organized a Doc Jam session to collect feedback on documentation. If you haven't been to a jam session before, it's pretty simple: Name a documentation topic that is missing. Help us write a table of contents for it. Here are the top three topics proposed by the attendees. 1. Managing system health How can an administrator tell a system is healthy? Symptoms and numbers to watch out for (too many nodes?) Collecting system statistics. Events to log routinely vs. events to log when in trouble. Serious vs. harmless log entries Issue scenarios like what to do when the search stops returning results. Idea! Create a Health app that provides vital stats. 2. Replicating your environment Replicating a complete site to a dev or test environment.  Configuration to change after cloning. Changing subscribers to avoid publishing content to production. 3. Activation (publishing) best practic...

It is not easy to write text that translates well. We just started translating  Magnolia CMS documentation  into Chinese. Here are five insights we learned on the way that make work easier for authors and translators. 1. Chinese Wikipedia is your friend Many software terms are well known in their original English form and may not need translation. For proprietary and established terms, check if Chinese Wikipedia translated them. If Wikipedia translates the term, you probably should too: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web容器 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_container If Wikipedia does not translate the term, you likely don't need to either. http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Servlet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Servlet Using commonly accepted, established terms avoids a lot of confusion. Users who read general documentation about the Java platform and Web technologies can apply the terms they learned. 2. Lower case and upper case don't exis...

We are launching  Magnolia Academy  today. It is a new independent learning resource that teaches Magnolia 5 step-by-step. Code samples, exercises, tests and videos help you learn in a way that suits you best. Magnolia Academy targets learners across the globe: a developer in Beijing who wants to put a star on their CV or a system admin in São Paulo who does not have access to classroom training. The idea of online courses was raised as we realized that we cannot offer personal training everywhere in the world. Magnolia's growth projections for the next two years made the situation imminent. As problems go, this one is a very nice problem to have. It's good to have growing demand. Responding to that demand just needs quick acting. The Documentation, Services and Development teams at Magnolia collaborated to produce online learning modules that range from basic system setup and project best practices to templating and app development. Check it out and post your fee...

Eleven years ago Tim Berners-Lee said that the next logical step for the World Wide Web was  semantic . The idea was that one day machines could read and understand Web pages. Content would be tagged in a meaningful way: a date would be tagged as a date and an address as an address. Relevance would replace ambiguity. Finding, sharing and combining information would become easier. Today the semantic Web remains a pipe dream. Here is quick proof: When in Basel, Switzerland, go to Google News . Look at the top stories. See a bunch of stories about bank liquidity requirements? Minimum capital levels for financial institutions? How are these stories relevant to you being in Basel? They are not. Google is doing simple string matching. It detects your geographical location to Basel. It then finds news stories that say "Basel". It doesn't know that the Basel III agreement that regulates bank capital adequacy just happens to be named after the city ...

I started writing a white paper on Magnolia CMS architecture couple of months ago. I initially targeted analysts and CTOs, thinking 10 pages would be optimal. After reviewing drafts with Philipp we felt we had to cover more topics and match architectural features to business benefits. The paper turned into a book! Magnolia CMS Technical Guide has new architecture diagrams that make complex topics such as the templating mechanism and clustering easier to understand. I also talk about why we chose the JCR Java Content Repository, explain the module system and show internationalization examples. Magnolia partners can download a PDF from the secure partner site .