7 comments

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  Daniel Bachhuber

  9 months ago

  [crickets, crickets]
  
  I think Ellington needs an open-source competitor for there even to be a discussion.
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  Steve Yelvington

  9 months ago

  The other obvious candidate is Drupal, which is now powering dozens of fairly large newspaper sites.
  
  However, the path from a generic Drupal download to a system properly configured to meet the needs of a large multimedia news organization is not a short one.
  
  We're working toward relaunch of Jacksonville.com on the Drupal platform by the end of the month, followed quickly thereafter by CJOnline.com. As quickly as possible we'll be releasing our work -- new Drupal modules and a configuration script -- to the open-source community.
  
  Our goal is to move from a model in which web sites are maintained by online specialists to one in which every member of the news organization can play an appropriate role in direct online publishing and interaction.
  
  The flexibility issue is huge. One of the benefits of our system will be that editors will have complete flexibility to change layouts of major display pages such as the homepage, section fronts, and topics pages. It won't be necessary to know any HTML.
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• 

  James Goffin

  9 months ago

  It's not just the fault of the CMS. There's a fundamental difference in the way you handle information to do all the sparkly stuff that is alien to knocking out a piece of text.
  To do a football league table as plain text you can just type it, bung in few tabs and you're done. To make that interactive you need a database table for the teams, for each result, some script to work out the points and generate the table.
  Open that up to a big competition like the FA Cup and you need an index that includes every club in the country. Or you could just type the text in, bung in a few tabs...
  Journalists are used to working with words and not data; they are two different disciplines that have a lot to offer each other, but different nonetheless.
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• 

  Martin Stabe

  9 months ago

  Absolutely right.
  
  But wouldn't you agree that most newsroom CMSs are designed specifically to do the sort of "knock out a piece of text" journalism and actually discourage the sort of mind shift towards data-driven work you describe?
  
  To build your database-driven football tables, for example, a technically knowledgeable journalist like yourself will most likely have to step outside the constraints of the system used by the to build it from scratch.
  
  The output from that application would then probably be piped back into the general framework that runs the paper's site with some ugly hack involving Javascript or iframes. That's an example of the creative workarounds I was talking about.
  
  The best website editors are those who can achieve this sort of stuff in spite of whatever systems are at their disposal.
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• 

  Ian Reeves

  9 months ago

  Hi Martin,
  I've built a very simple Drupal site for students (and staff) at the Uni of Kent's new Centre for Journalism (www.centreforjournalism.co.uk) to use as a live publishing environment as they learn their trade. It fulfills the basic brief of allowing them to post blogs, stories, images, videos and audio content - with some areas restricted for departmental eyes only, for assessed work etc - but the idea is that as they progress, they'll also be involved in the site's development into something far more sophisticated. Hopefully they'll eventually bringing ideas I've never even thought of to the table.
  It's currently an online-only cms, of course, but I note there's some discussion on the Drupal Newspaper Group about integration with InDesign and InCopy that I'll be following closely.
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• 

  Dave Spathaky

  9 months ago

  Yep, for sure, it's all about workflow....
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• 

  savings

  5 months ago

  Great post. He definitely needs a competitor, there's no arguing that Joomla is quickly becoming one of the top content management system (CMS) platforms on the Internet. But that being said drupal has a major share in the CMS market.
  reply