Magnolia 5.6 reached end of life on June 25, 2020. This branch is no longer supported, see End-of-life policy.
On the surface, both the modules and apps associated with publishing and activation do serve the same thingpurpose: publish content from an author instance to a public instance:
The Nevertheless, the internals of this process are , however, different:
Activation module has been refactored and split into multiple modules.
Driving reason for the activation rewrite was to split activation into set of maintanable and extensible components. Another reason was to remove deprecated code usages. Base The core activation concepts remained unchanged. Transport remain the same. Despite the transport layer is still using the HTTP protocol. However new , publishing implementation allows to easily plug in any type of transport layer....
The bundles and webapps in the 5.6 branch are shipped with publishing by default. If you are migrating from a pre-5.6 Magnolia branch and intend to replace activation with publising, use publishing, please see the Publishing vs Activation and custom commands section on the Upgrading to Magnolia 5.6.x page.
Using activation is still possible, but only after replacing the Publishing module and the Publishing Transactional module with the Activation module and the Transactional Activation module, respectively. You can do this in two ways:
../WEB-INF/lib
folders of your author and public instances. Add the activation JAR files in their place.