Magnolia is quite complex and feature reach framework with mutliple ways of deployment. Steepness of learning curve much depend on the way you pick to go. Personally when I got basics covered it is still hard to quickly work with because my current setup require redeployment after each change which delays development cycle a lot (not to mention its boring).

Idea: publish best practice(s) of magnolia usage for newbies and advanced users. Covering simple and obvious areas like:

• IDE setup
• bundled or mavenized
• .jsp or freemarker.
• module or .war
• blossom or bootstrap
  etc

For now I think i know the best way to develop .jsp templates - to go for mavenized magnolia + netbeans IDE. It would allow to update .jsp and see immediate result in your browser, still haveing IDE to edit the templates.

Community member runger has other preferences: http://forum.magnolia-cms.com/forum/thread.html?threadId=69ea1310-8a60-4f43-a32d-ad8d6d62511f&page=1