How to customize magnolia Standard Templating Kit(STK)

Magnolia STK demo website gives the idea how websites can be implemented using STK. Have a look at STK demo website found at this url. In regards to previous blog posts about magnolia has explained how magnoliaAuthor and Public instances are configured along with STK. Some of the basics of magnolia which have been keyed in with previous posts don't really need explaning so we don't discuss those.

The easiest way to develop custom websites is through customizing demo websites to suit specific requirements. websites can not be developed from the scratch with STK as, it has many constrains. it would be important to explain why new websites can not be developed from the scratch with STK. Still you can find workarounds if you are expert having in-depth knowledge of STK.( Reading this para is not mandatory to follow rest of the post as it contain insight information of magnolia which may seems daunting to newbies). Each magnolia webpage is constructed combining different Areas( refer magnolia STK terminology) such as platformArea, extrasArea, TeaserArea, MainArea , Stage, Header , Footer , navigation (vertical and horiontal) etc. if you want to add new Area to your website with stk , THAT CAN NOT BE DONE. You are restricted to the number of areas provided by magnolia. Also configuration elements of each of these areas are specific to each. If you consider one Area such as main area, you can add new features to that area by adding new paragraphs under paragraph node. you have that freedom to write your own paragraph template scripts and then to define your own paragraphs and dialogs. But when it comes to templates , you can only edit template script that ships with STK but no new template scripts can be added.

Lets start studying magnolia AdminCental interface to customize magnolia demo project.

Above figure depicts initial window will be opened after installing magnolia STK. Configuration of demo project templates and paragraphs are done through Templating Kit side menu.Demo project's CSS and java script files are also edited through the features provided under this menu. Now lets try understand how different elements presented under Templating Kit wire up together to build up professional website. At first , organization of different configuration elements of the demo project looks daunting in it's complexity.

Lets have a look at configuration elements available when Templating Kit side menu is opened.

As you can see, it provides

1. Site Configuration

2. Thems

3. Template Definitions

4. Paragraph Definitions

5. Dialog Definitions

6. Templates

7. Resources

All together 7 configuration elements. When i was facing these elements at first, my initial dough was , how each of these elements are working together. when i am changing one element , how does it affect whole website.

Most important part is to understand the job done by each of these configuration elements when building professional website. As you can see, i have highlighted the first menu item which is Site Configuration. it is the HEART of the all the configuration elements and whole site is derived from the prototype defined under site configuration.

Now lets study how home page of demo website has been built using site prototype.

Above figure tries to explain how to Home page of demo project is derived from the site prototype. As you can see, Home page has several parts such as Header, Stage , MainArea , Promos Area etc. Site prototype also has those areas define. if you remove header form the site prototype , it will not be displayed on the final output. To demostrate

How to set up Magnolia Author and Magnolia Public instances on eclipse

In this tutorial i am going to demonstrate how to set up magnolia Public and Author instances on eclipse using maven automated build environment.So , how do we start , yes that is a good question because official magnolia documentation does not provide such a information directly. So what do we do, what we can do is we can search for Google to find if someone else on this planet has faced the similar situation before. likely as expected someone else on this planet has faced this problem.

When i was searching the Google for magnolia + eclipse key words , oh, unfortunately i hit with following page.it is about retrieving magnolia source to our environment. But here what i need is not magnolia source. it is magnoliaAuthor and magnoilaPublic war files. those files should be set up on our eclipse environment as a project with the use of mvn automated build environment.Requirement of such a set up is this. say, you are developing a module for eclipse then each time when you want to test your module you have to build your module jar and upload that in to magniliaAuthor or public applications lib location. But since we are using mvn we can automate this process if we have magnoliaAuthor and public instances running on our workspace as a project. for this propose we don't need magnolia source.

Then i changed key works in to magnolia module development + eclipse. yes! that is what i was looking for. This mail discussion contains the information i was searching for.

This page contains two url's regarding to magnolia module development.

http://www.mail-archive.com/user-list@magnolia.info/msg08267.html