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You make very important points. Upvoted. > 1. You can't afford the talent required to pull off a bespoke CMS. > 2. You can't afford the cost of lifecycle main
by natrius 16y ago
You make very important points. Upvoted.
> 1. You can't afford the talent required to pull off a bespoke CMS.
> 2. You can't afford the cost of lifecycle maintenance on a bespoke CMS.
Us at The Texas Tribune or potential Armstrong users? We're doing pretty fine with our CMS. Armstrong users won't have to pay to maintain an entire CMS since community maintenance should take care of most of their needs. They'll have to pay to maintain their templates and additions to the CMS, but they're already paying for those with their current CMS. I think Armstrong will end up saving many news organizations money over going with a proprietary solution.
> 3. Newspaper editors make horrible PM's on software development projects.
Is this in regard to the Armstrong project itself or implementations of it? There's little editorial interaction with Armstrong. We know what the two newsrooms involved need, and we've already built a CMS that satisfies those needs. Now we're abstracting out our unique needs and trying to anticipate the places where other implementors will need to make customizations. I think it'll work out fine.
Now that we've estabished your efforts are (at best) doomed to mediocrity drop what you're doing immediately and go check out Pressflow.
No thanks. I and many other developers are more productive in Python than in PHP. If there's a barrier between your CMS and the news applications you want to integrate with it, you will be even less productive, and many possible projects will be written off from the get go. (We could do everything in PHP/Drupal, but no.) For more on that, see Matt Waite's recent article: http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/matt-waite-to-build-a-digital-future-for-news-developers-have-to-be-able-to-hack-at-the-core-of-the-old-ways/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/matt-waite-to-build-a-digit...
No developer in a news organization wants to be faced with an "All these worlds are yours, except the CMS. Attempt no landings there" type of situation. A news CMS built using the tools that developers want to build news applications with is a huge win.
- look_lookatme 16y agoA news CMS built using the tools that developers want to build news applications with is a huge win. This is absolutely true. Find good PMs, developers and designers you trust to do good work, give them authority and time.
- benohear 16y agoPython aside, could you give us a couple of examples where a development would be made complicated by Drupal but would be easy on Armstrong?
- natrius 16y agoI'm not very familiar with Drupal or the news CMSs built on top of it.
- knieveltech 16y agoAfter four years working in the industry I can say with confidence that in 100% of the news organizations I've interacted with humoring the developers resulted in a disaster. Newspapers are not software shops. From a business perspective there's no money in humoring the guys in the development department on this one. Money's too scarce. It's cheaper and more effective to can any dissidents, swap in competent PHP developers and go with an implementation that minimizes wheel reinvention and the amount of code the organization is responsible for maintaining.
- natrius 16y agoCheaper? Yes. More effective? Debatable. If a news organization is just trying to put articles online, then sure, that approach works. If they want to push the boundaries of what's possible in online journalism, you're not going to be able to accomplish that by sticking the cheapest cogs in the machine. Armstrong users will only have to maintain their templates and customizations. This is a requirement no matter which CMS you pick.
- knieveltech 16y agoI once cooked up an implementation targeted at the "Local Events" vertical. It implemented 100% of Zvents feature set and took 15 hours to put together. That tells me everything I need to know about effectiveness. Basically my point boils down to this: there are freely available, insanely flexible, totally customizable CMS's that have been under active development for a decade or more. Given how long it takes to create truly polished software of any kind, starting a CMS project from thin air doesn't make sense, you're hundreds of thousands of developer hours behind existing projects on day one.