Frontend options for Magnolia: from CMS to live storefront

Magnolia is a enterprise, Java-based CMS you can run headless: it delivers content through its REST and GraphQL content APIs, but it does not ship a finished, production-ready frontend. Building that frontend is a separate decision, and a visual page builder is one of the routes for Magnolia.

What Magnolia gives you

Magnolia manages your content, editorial workflow and localization, and exposes it through its REST and GraphQL content APIs. What it does not give you is a ready storefront: layout, components and page logic are yours to build.

The frontend question

Every Magnolia project faces the same choice. Four options are established:

• Official starter or template: great to learn, you keep building the production frontend
• Community framework: active, but no official product and no enterprise support net
• Custom build (Next.js or Nuxt): full control, six to twelve months plus maintenance
• Visual page builder: components, hosting and a visual editor in the platform, live in weeks

Laioutr as the frontend layer for Magnolia

Laioutr reads your Magnolia content through its REST and GraphQL content APIs and renders it as a fast frontend, with 70+ components, EU hosting and Core Web Vitals by default. Magnolia stays your content backend; Laioutr delivers the frontend. See, for example, the Page Builder for TYPO3.

FAQ

Does Laioutr replace Magnolia? No. Magnolia stays the content backend; Laioutr is the frontend layer on top.

How does Laioutr connect to Magnolia? Through its REST and GraphQL content APIs, plus project-specific queries for custom logic.

More on the category: what a Frontend Management Platform is, or the Laioutr home page.