Building a Hero Banner Page with Dialogs in Magnolia CMS

May 14, 2025 |

13 minutes read

Hero Banner Essentials with Magnolia CMS

Designing an engaging and acceptable front page is crucial to any website. Such a practical solution is applying a hero banner, which offers an immediate visual effect and conveys powerful messages to users in one second. Magnolia CMS, with its dynamic templating process and rock-solid dialog construction, allows developers to employ such tools to their full potential. Hire Magnolia developers to create your next project, This book is a head-to-toe tutorial on designing an editable, working hero banner page in Magnolia.

Why Use Magnolia CMS for Custom Page Templates

Magnolia CMS is highly scalable and modular and is ideally suited to build and manage enterprise websites. Its templating is page, area, and component type for level control over functionality and design. For magnolia development service providers, the architecture offers a means to build maintainable codebases and allow content teams to leverage simple authoring tools.

Here, the hero banner explodes into something more than a fixed graphical element. It is an interactive, malleable template that translates beautifully into Magnolia’s dialog system, allowing editors to edit without ever laying hands on code. This harmony between form and function is one of the reasons why most companies prefer to take advantage of the services of a Magnolia development agency or work straight with Magnolia developers with the right expertise.

Setting Up Your Project Environment with Magnolia CMS

To start development in Magnolia, make sure you have the most current version of the CMS. Scaffolding your project is easily done using the command-line tool that Magnolia offers. With a blank webapp environment as a starting point, you gain the capability to install your own custom module and some templates without the unwanted trappings.

Once your instance is installed and running, you can structure your custom dialogs, configurations, and templates within your module (my-website, for instance). Within your module, you would have a hero banner page template, associate it with a FreeMarker template, and define the corresponding dialogs.

Creating the Hero Banner Page Template

FreeMarker Template Script

The FreeMarker file defines the HTML structure of the hero banner page. Create a template at:
/my-website/templates/pages/hero.ftl
Here is a basic implementation:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang=”${cmsfn.language()}”>
<head>
    [@cms.page /]
    <title>${content.windowTitle!content.title!}</title>
    <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”${ctx.contextPath}/.resources/my-website/webresources/css/hero.css” />
</head>
<body>
    <div class=”hero”>
        <h1>${content.title!}</h1>
        <p>${content.subtitle!}</p>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

This layout includes placeholders for a title and subtitle, allowing for dynamic updates via dialogs.

Template Definition (YAML)

Next, define the page template in a YAML file:
/title: Hero Banner Page
templateScript: /my-website/templates/pages/hero.ftl
renderType: freemarker
dialog: my-website: pages/hero
title: Hero Page
description: Template for pages with a hero banner
visible: true
Save this as:
/my-website/templates/pages/hero.yaml

This step ensures the template is visible and usable within the Pages app of Magnolia.

Defining Editable Dialogs

Dialogs are what make Magnolia CMS powerful for content editors. They provide a friendly interface for managing content.

Hero Dialog YAML

Create the dialog configuration to include title and subtitle fields:

form:
  properties:
    title:
      $type: textField
      label: Page Title
      i18n: true
    subtitle:
      $type: textField
      label: Subtitle
      i18n: true
Store this dialog at:
/my-website/dialogs/pages/hero.yaml

This setup makes the title and subtitle fields editable via Magnolia’s content editor.

Adding Styling with CSS

Include a stylesheet to give the hero banner a modern and clean look:

.hero {
    background: #f0f0f0;
    padding: 80px 30px;
    text-align: center;
}
.hero h1 {
    font-size: 3em;
    color: #222;
}
.hero p {
    font-size: 1.5em;
    color: #555;
}
Save the stylesheet to:
/my-website/webresources/css/hero.css

Use Magnolia’s resource registration to ensure the CSS loads properly with the template.

Enabling Dynamic Components within Hero Area

To make your hero section reusable and expandable, define an area for components like buttons, images, or additional text blocks.

Updating Template YAML

Update your template definition to include an area:

areas:
  heroArea:
    availableComponents:
      heroImage:
        id: my-website: components/heroImage

callToAction:
id: my-website : components/callToAction

Create Custom Components

You can create components like heroImage and callToAction with their own YAML and FreeMarker scripts. This allows content editors to build more complex layouts while keeping the structure intact.

A simple button component, for instance:

form:
  properties:
    buttonText:
      $type: textField
      label: Button Text
    buttonLink:
      $type: linkField
      label: Link
And the corresponding FreeMarker script:

<a href=”${content.buttonLink}” class=”btn”>${content.buttonText}</a>

Creating the Page

With the templates and dialogs in place, create a page:

Log in to Magnolia AdminCentral.
Open the Pages app.
Choose the root or a subfolder to create your page.
Click “Add Page”, name it home, and select Hero Banner Page.
Enter content via the dialog and save.
Publish the page.

Your hero banner is now live and fully manageable.

Advanced Configurations and Personalization

You can also enhance the hero banner with personalization modules in Magnolia, where various groups of users are shown a different version of the banner. This is particularly beneficial to marketing teams who have various sets of customers as targets.

You may also integrate analytics packages and A/B testing solutions through Magnolia modules or third-party integrations. Magnolia developers can also script custom logic for tracking interactions and dynamically updating content.

Working with a Magnolia Development Company

Employing premium templates and custom components requires profound knowledge in Magnolia’s templating principle. With a reliable magnolia development agency, your site is built with best practices at hand and is always scalable. The agencies usually offer complete-fledged magnolia development services like module development, integration, and optimization.

For any other businesses that do not have CMS expertise in-house, it typically is best to hire magnolia developers on a project basis. They can implement new features quickly, debug, and make your CMS up to date with your business requirements.

Benefits of Modular Development

By using modular components and dialogs in your hero banner, you benefit from the following:

Editor empowerment: Non-technical editors can edit banner text, images, and links without code.
Design consistency: Templates impose design rules but leave some room for creativity.
Speed to market: Reusable components accelerate future page builds.
Scalability: Easy to add height to fit in video, sliders, or user-centric content.

Create Stunning Hero Pages with Magnolia CMS

The Way Forward

You do not need to make an expensive project to clean up your in-house PHP program. Proper software and planning, and a compatibility-over-rewrite strategy, can enable your machine to benefit from the performance and security improvements of newer versions of PHP in a very short amount of time.

Having in-house personnel or renting specialists offering custom PHP web application development services, investing in upgrade fees periodically is worth it in the long term.

Your app is more secure, more stable, and simpler to upgrade — scaleable and adaptable to react to what your business demands.