Developing a custom pages app

This page describes how to develop a custom pages app whose features are similar to the Magnolia Pages app but is tailored to the needs of your project, for example to:

  • Provide a custom action to create a page that is linked to some external content.

  • Store the content in a custom workspace and with a custom node type.

Currently, it is not possible to create a custom pages app with Magnolia Light Development alone. A custom Java module is required.

Introduction

You can provision the Page Editor UI in any app, creating a more powerful and intuitive Magnolia for you Authoring team(s).

Authors may want to use the Page Editor UI in other apps besides the Pages app. For example, to create:

  • a Mobile or Kiosk apps, to allow editing of multiple channels.

  • a Reusables app, to allow creation of parts of pages which could be reused in many pages.

This is supported in both the FreeMarker and the headless modes.

Example

Follow these steps to try the demonstration which will create a custom pages app which utilizes a custom workspace and nodeType.

  1. Clone the custom-pages-app-barebones repository.

  2. Execute the mgnl jumpstart command and in the options list displayed, select magnolia-community-demo-webapp.

  3. Build the module (a) and copy the jar file into the webapp (b):

    1. cd custom-pages-support && mvn clean install && cd ..

    2. cp custom-pages-support/target/custom-pages-support-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar apache-tomcat/webapps/magnoliaAuthor/WEB-INF/lib/

  4. Run mgnl start.

  5. Run the React application:

    1. cd spa/spa-react-app

    2. npm install && npm run start

  6. In the Security app, assign permissions to the rest-anonymous user role.

    1. On the Access control lists tab, set CustomWebsite to Read Only for the / path.

    2. On the Web access tab, assign the Get method to the /.rest/annotations/* path.

Sample custom pages app

For reference, see the code example of a custom pages app:

git clone {repo-git-customPagesAppBarebones}

Implementation tips

  • The workspace and nodeType are registered through the contentType. See /light-modules/custom-pages-app-lm/contentTypes/customPages.yaml in the cloned repository.

  • The new template annotation (/light-modules/custom-pages-app-lm/restEndpoints/annotations/) and delivery (/light-modules/custom-pages-app-lm/restEndpoints/delivery/) endpoints now target the custom workspace.

    The SPA is updated to use this custom annotations endpoint. See spa/spa-react-app/src/environment.js.

  • Some classes that are required are only component-mapped for the pages-app. To re-use them in the custom Pages app, they must be mapped manually at the moment.

    • Bear in mind that the id is hard-coded, so the name of the custom pages app needs to be custom-pages-app.

    • See the module descriptor.

  • The Add page action must define the custom createPage dialog to create pages with the custom nodeType.

  • Until Magnolia 6.2.38, there were hard-coded workspace checks in DefaultTemplateAvailability and ConfiguredSiteTemplateAvailability. See MGNLSITE-161 for more details.

    • The example project works around this with a custom availability class (info.magnolia.custom.availability.CustomSiteTemplateAvailability).

    • As of the 6.2.38 release, the custom availability class is no longer needed.
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