"Content repositories specialize in intelligent content storage, while applications like Magnolia can focus on the management and presentation of content," wrote Boris Kraft, a member of the Magnolia Development Team, in an open letter released today to announce the availability for download of the first major upgrade to the Magnolia Open Source content management project.

From the start, explained Kraft, the Magnolia Open CMS was designed to meet mission-critical J2EE enterprise requirements (such as availability, performance and scalability):

"It did so via a built-in clustering and an intelligent cache. Magnolia"s optimized high-performance cache stores compressed pages. The result was that Magnolia has been able to deliver pages more than twice as fast as a typical web server."

Kraft"s Magnolia 2.0 open letter highlights two key upgrades:

Usability: In Magnolia 2.0 is "developers…succeeded in transferring well-known desktop software behavior to the web-based user interface. The result is a substantially improved user experience, which for once earns the often-strained description "intuitive"."

Specifically, wrote Kraft, in Magnolia 2.0 all actions can be performed directly in the web-browser using the right mouse button. Content elements can be moved and sorted using drag & drop. Thus the use of the system is simplified and faster, and required user training and resulting costs are minimized.

Use of Java Content Repository API (JSR-170): Kraft proudly noted that Magnolia 2.0 is first open-source CMS and one the first products at all based on the new JSR-170 standard, which defines the "Java Content Repository API."

Kraft explained JSR-170 thus:

"The Java Content Repository (JSR-170) standard removes barriers for the migration of content between systems. The substantial investment into the content production is lastingly secured. Since all major manufacturers in the database and CMS market have announced their support for JSR-170, customers will be able to select between the different JSR-170 compatible implementations. This lets customers combine the most suitable content management system with the most suitable repository."

Magnolia 2.0 was primarily developed by engineers and devs at Obinary, a software and consulting firm located in Basel/Switzerland that also offers commercial support, hosting, training and implementation services for Magnolia. Magnolia 2.0 uses the open-source licensed JSR-170-implementation "Jackrabbit" as a content repository, based on version 0.14 of the JSR-170 standard definition.