Should you migrate your project to Magnolia 5?

  • Yes if you need a new feature such as support for mobile devices. Read the release notes from 4.5.1 up and 5.0 up to see what is new. 
  • Yes if you want to benefit from the new user interface.
  • Yes if you need professional support from Magnolia International.
    • Magnolia 4.4 reached end-of-life on June 30, 2015.
    • Magnolia 4.5 reached end-of-life on June 30, 2016.
  • No if you don't want to, don't see a compelling reason to, and you don't need support.

Background

The early plans for Magnolia 5 included many significant new features: multichannel support, JCR 2.0, STK 2.0, improved templating API and touch-native administration interface. During development we realized that releasing the full feature set at once would put too much load on the community and on our development, service, support and training teams.

With this in mind, we devised a 2-step migration process:

  1.  Magnolia 4.5 was an intermediate step between the 4.4 and 5. It introduced multichannel support, JCR 2.0, STK 2.0 and the improved templating API.
  2. Magnolia 5.0 added the touch-native administrative interface, apps, DAM, Vaadin 7, CKEditor and more features.

Recommendations

  • If you are starting a completely new project, start with Magnolia 5.2. This way you don't need to migrate anything.
  • If you currently use Magnolia 4.4, complete all the steps in the migration roadmap.
  • If you currently use Magnolia 4.5, complete only steps 1, 2 and 10 in the migration roadmap.

We continue to improve the migration tool and documentation as we learn from client project migrations. If your deployment is large and complex you may wish to wait until early adopters have migrated to 5.2. This way you benefit from their experience and the optimizations we make to the migration tool.

Automated vs. manual migration

From 4.4 to 4.5

Automatic migration – Migration of the following is automated by the migration toolkit:

  • Magnolia modules (STK, Form, PUR etc.)
  • Basic template configuration changes
  • Any custom templates that extend STK templates
  • Custom template scripts (.ftl, .jsp)
  • STK extensions
  • Detection of potential new areas

Manual migration – The following things must be migrated by hand.

  • Template models

From 4.5 to 5.2

Automatic migration – Migration of the following will be automated by the migration toolkit:

  • Dialog configurations

Manual migration – The following things must be migrated by hand.

  • Customizations to AdminCentral
  • Extensions to dialogs (for example, custom field types and save handlers)