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Magnolia's Cumulus DAM Connector allows users to connect a Canto Cumulus DAM to Magnolia. Cumulus is popular, enterprise-grade digital asset management platform that offers digital right rights management and many back-end connections, including Adobe Photoshop and InDesign and more. Visit Canto's Cumulus to learn more. Their documentation provides for both for beginners and advanced users of the platform.

You can use DAM content within a Magnolia website in a manner that resembles working with native Magnolia content. In addition to exposing DAM content to Magnolia websites, the module provides access to DAM content management. The The Cumulus DAM Connector installs the Cumulus Asset app that allows users to browse assets in a remote (Cumulus) DAM. 

Installing

The Cumulus DAM module is not bundled with Magnolia. You can download it from our Nexus repository as a WAR file or include it in your custom webapp by adding following Maven dependency to your POM file.

You can also include the supplementary modules, Cumulus Integration and DAM Extensions.

You can also download the module as a war file:

• Artifact resource link
  groupId info.magnolia.cumulus artifactId canto-cumulus-webapp label $artifactId.war renderType download_link resourceType WAR

Uninstalling

Before uninstalling the module, remove the /server/filters/cumulus filter node.

Configuring connections

Cumulus DAM Integration is an Enterprise Pro edition module. Once you have installed the module (following the standard instructions referenced below), configure connection details for your Cumulus installation. Add the location of the server in:

• /modules/canto-cumulus-integration/rest-client/cumulus/baseUrl and
• /modules/canto-cumulus-integration/config/

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REST API

All communication between Magnolia and Canto Cumulus is made over the REST API provided by Cumulus.

All calls dealing with Cumulus are made over an authenticated connection using the technical account configured for access between Magnolia and Cumulus. Magnolia does not access any non-public or deprecated API calls of Cumulus.

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Cumulus Assets app

The Cumulus DAM Connector installs the Cumulus Assets app that allows users to browse all assets in the remote DAM. Such assets can be images, videos or documents stored by other users in the DAM. The asset information is read-only since the product update API is not exposed by Cumulus DAM Connector at the moment. Assets cannot be updated within Magnolia.

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Cumulus DAM Connector templates

The module doesn't bootstrap any special templates, rather it exposes itself as an additional source of images in existing edit dialogs for Magnolia components. This means the module assimilates itself with existing STK templates . The templates are available in the STK > Template Definitions. The asset renderer also passes information about the rendered assets to Cumulus ensuring the correct variation defined by STK is returned by Cumulus and rendered on Magnolia pages.

Dialog with options for Magnolia and Cumulus assets:

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Cumulus asset selected, link field displayed:

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Cumulus asset chooser dialog:

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Creating custom templates and dialogs

Using a Cumulus-originating Asset in a Magnolia template is no different from using Magnolia's own assets.

To expose a Cumulus Asset in the dialog, use:

/modules/standard-templating-kit/dialogs/generic/controls/tabImage/fields/img/options/cumulus

Or include the whole /modules/standard-templating-kit/dialogs/generic/controls/tabImage image tab configuration in your dialog to expose both Magnolia and Cumulus assets and leave the choice of using either asset source to editors. 

ID syntax

The ID syntax supports referencing assets via different categories. Assets in the Chooser dialog use the following format:

cumulus.$Categories/<hierarchy of categories down to the product> 

for example:

cumulus.$Categories/Asset-Typen/Bilder/Fotos/JPEG/Cumulus Clouds

This is the ID that is supplied by all component instances that have a configured product or category chooser dialog. The ID needs to be understood and parsed by custom templates and model classes if you use other than the default damfn templating functions for asset processing.

Caching and performance

Magnolia automatically caches all REST calls made to Cumulus if the response calls contain valid cache expire headers with an appropriate time interval describing the response as cacheable. All responses without cache headers are assumed to be non-cacheable.

You can configure a custom cache policy in addition to the code provided by the module. Include an extra cache filter in the REST client configuration. One way to improve performance is a custom cache configuration that stores the details of calls in distributed memory shared by all public nodes. This can help in environments where Magnolia public instances perform a large number of calls.

Rendered images and their corresponding variations are served directly from the Cumulus cloud to the users browsing the website. Direct serving ensures that Cumulus can substitute images in case of DRM restrictions or in case the copyright for a rendered asset or its variation has expired.

Resources

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Canto Cumulus home page

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