19 ms·

Scoop: A Glimpse Into the NYTimes CMS

190 points by edavis 12y ago

keehun 12y ago
Very interesting and cool article, although I wonder what the point of this is? Just a show and tell? Doesn't seem like they're open sourcing it.
- systematical 12y ago
  https://github.com/NYTimes/ice/ https://github.com/NYTimes/ice/
  - keehun 12y ago
    I know ICE is on it. That's just a VERY small part of the entire CMS, however. Why the downvotes?
    - grayclhn 12y ago
      I didn't downvote you, but vague comments idly questioning the point of the article usually don't do well on HN.
      - keehun 12y ago
        Oh, I should have written my post better. It should be known that I love behind-the-scenes more than the movies, and I love these peeks more than anything else. Just was genuinely curious why NYTimes would take the time to show us. I don't think it would help any with the subscriptions/circulation numbers but I am probably wrong.
- fleaflicker 12y ago
  Like any other company's engineering blog, a post like this can help with recruiting and it's also a nice way for the team to summarize and share what they built.
- ar_turnbull 12y ago
  It's also relevant to the NYT's goal of surviving the digital shift. Giving the world a peek under the hood isn't just an interesting story, it's brand-building for a publication that wants to be seen as modern.
- rajivpant 12y ago
  Open sourcing it is a good suggestion and one that some have made previously. Open sourcing it requires a fair amount of work to remove company-specific, internal stuff and making it easy for others to install, upgrade and maintain it on their own. That fair amount of work hasn't yet made it high on a priority list, but let us hope it will :-)
jonaldomo 12y ago
I could see this as premium wordpress service successfully charging $15 - 25 a month for bloggers.
- cliveowen 12y ago
  I don't, and it would be too expensive even at $15 imo. But even if something like this had a market there's the problem of the editor, as it uses contenteditable which is at best inconsistent across browser and at worst completely broken. That's also the reason Google Docs dropped it and started doing editing the hard way. As long as you know who uses your software and you can enforce the use of a given browser (as is the case with the writers for the NYT) there's no problem with contenteditable, but for a general solution you need to drop it.
  - volaski 12y ago
    ice plugin works for tinymce as well as contenteditable http://nytimes.github.io/ice/demo/ http://nytimes.github.io/ice/demo/
BrandonSmith 12y ago
The CMS is in a renaissance period with Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and the like falling out of favor. I believe the CMS is bifurcating into two specialized directions. Several online publishers are coming out and describing their new, home-grown custom CMS. The features are rich and provide robust, innovative tools across the long-form content lifecycle: writing, editing, and publication. There is special attention to collaboration. On the other hand, more and more website developers align themselves with the goals and properties of static site generators. SSGs are best suited what I call "malleable" websites. Thus, I think the way to think about this CMS renaissance is that traditional the CMS tried (and failed) to optimize for both long-form content and the malleable website. As a result, people are sick of trying to patch the traditional CMS with plugin after plugin and instead are simply crafting their own.
- iancarroll 12y ago
  > The CMS is in a renaissance period with Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and the like falling out of favor. I think Wordpress is still going to stay in the game. It still has a road ahead of it. I do think that the big newsrooms are going to expand past it's limiting multiple-people collaboration features into a new CMS, but most blogs will want to use WP.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  I don't know about Joomla but Wordpress and Drupal are hardly falling out of favor; they're actually both growing quite rapidly. Developing a custom CMS makes sense for exactly one type of company: a publisher whose entire business depends on their CMS. For companies in that situation, developing a custom CMS is a capital investment in their core product. Everyone else will save time, money, and security headaches by building on a popular open source platform. Heck even Twitter uses Drupal to power their developer site.
  - BrandonSmith 12y ago
    Ironically, I've heard the argument that, for the malleable website case, most people will save time, money, and security headaches by avoiding the traditional CMS. My point is that the traditional CMS is falling out of favor as the default solution for content on the Web. Need a blog? Wordpress is increasingly NOT the solution. As developers, we are trending away from the one-size-fits-all CMS and into specialized categories of CMS. The CMS renaissance is due to two factors: 1) A proliferation of great tools emerging into a toolchain ecosystems. Node's Grunt and Gulp are fine examples. This is largely different than the traditional CMS because... 2) Developers are increasingly wanting to gain more control over our craft.
nsher 12y ago
Looks like Drupal with a few node_hooks to me
burritofanatic 12y ago
I was always under the impression that they're Django/Python. Can anyone confirm?
- krishy 12y ago
  No. We use a pretty normal ("boring") Java stack with Spring, Hibernate and Jersey. Some of the older components use Struts + JSPs whereas the newer components use Backbone (and related libraries).
  - augustl 12y ago
    Which database? A JDBC one?
    - lvnenchak 12y ago
      scoop uses mysql for its managed repository. we also use mongodb for our published repository that serves our apis to everybody else.
- danso 12y ago
  The NYT devs consist of several dev groups and a mix of stacks...some which are business-facing/product, and others that are in editorial (i.e. interactive news graphics). On the editorial side, they are one of the few in the news business that were using Ruby/Rails (the vast majority of newsrooms use Python/Django). There's also obviously a primarily-JavaScript group.
  - superchink 12y ago
    See krishy's comment above. It looks like they do not use Ruby/Rails for the CMS for editors, but use Java instead.
    - danso 12y ago
      Right...I should've clarified...by "editorial", I meant the team that focuses on the public facing news projects, such as Derek Willis's campaign finance apps and utilities (http://itemizer.herokuapp.com/ http://itemizer.herokuapp.com/)...I don't think they do a lot of monolithic-type Rails apps currently, though, at least compared to client-side-heavy projects
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jawns 12y ago
Context: I'm a former copy editor with experience working for digital-only (e.g. Forbes.com) as well as print-driven magazines newspapers. One of the things that's difficult when designing a CMS that works for both digital and print is that there are far fewer space constraints online than in print, and you want to ultimately generate an article that works in both formats. (Oh, and on mobile, and in a condensed version in a sister publication, and an expanded version for the wire.) For hard news, the inverted pyramid format comes in handy -- if you don't have enough space in the print edition, you just lop off the last few paragraphs -- but for things like op/eds and magazine-style pieces, that doesn't always work. What I'd love to see is a CMS (and, more fundamentally, a way of representing the underlying data) in which writers and editors can designate certain paragraphs or sentences or phrases as more important than others, so that even a story with a complex format can be dynamically "scaled," sort of like what web designers do with media queries, or what image editors do with seam carving.
- charonn0 12y ago
 > a way of representing the underlying data in which writers and editors can designate certain paragraphs or sentences or phrases as more important than others Doesn't HTML do this? <h1> is more important than <h2>, etc.
 - grrowl 12y ago
 You're missing the mark of this scenario — the headings are all more important than paragraphs, but maybe a summary or "background info" paragraph is clearly less integral than its nearby paragraphs, or maybe the second half of an intro feels a bit "fluffy" but still adds. If you have space constraints, they'd be the first priority to go.
 - jawns 12y ago
 Well, yes, but in only the broadest sense possible. For the purposes of an op-ed piece or a feature story, though, you'd need to have much more control. Actually, this comment illustrates that such a system might not be as easy as you'd think. Some natural-language processing/generation would come in handy to ensure the following <num-of-bullets> things: * proper capitalization * subject/verb agreement * proper punctuation * number agreement
powera 12y ago
This appears to be unrelated to the Kuro5hin derived CMS named Scoop?
minikomi 12y ago
Are there any google docs based CMS's ? Seems like you could offload the editing, saving, tracking changes to google docs - a platform many people seem familiar with now - and then keep the actual CMS to a bare minimum. Have it import the text & spit out a static page even.
- stdbrouw 12y ago
  Bangor Daily News does all of their editing in Google Docs. They then feed things into WordPress and InDesign, but I imagine you could feed it into pretty much anywhere. http://dev.bangordailynews.com/2011/06/16/marrying-google-docs-and-wordpress-or-really-any-cms/ http://dev.bangordailynews.com/2011/06/16/marrying-google-do... http://toc.oreilly.com/2011/06/google-docs-wordpress-indesign-workflow.html http://toc.oreilly.com/2011/06/google-docs-wordpress-indesig...
- amalag 12y ago
  That is a very interesting idea, but since NYTimes opensourced their ICE editor, I am not sure what Google Docs would provide.
  - minikomi 12y ago
    Transparent version control, tracking of changes, collaborative editing, familiar interface, familiar workflow (just drop finished articles into this directory to be available to the CMS)
Grue3 12y ago
It looks surprisingly nice for an in-house app. Usually there's no point to focus on web-design for these kind of apps since the public won't be able to see them anyway.

190 points by edavis 12y ago

Very interesting and cool article, although I wonder what the point of this is? Just a show and tell? Doesn't seem like they're open sourcing it.

systematical 12y ago
https://github.com/NYTimes/ice/ https://github.com/NYTimes/ice/
- keehun 12y ago
  I know ICE is on it. That's just a VERY small part of the entire CMS, however. Why the downvotes?
  - grayclhn 12y ago
    I didn't downvote you, but vague comments idly questioning the point of the article usually don't do well on HN.
    - keehun 12y ago
      Oh, I should have written my post better. It should be known that I love behind-the-scenes more than the movies, and I love these peeks more than anything else. Just was genuinely curious why NYTimes would take the time to show us. I don't think it would help any with the subscriptions/circulation numbers but I am probably wrong.
fleaflicker 12y ago
Like any other company's engineering blog, a post like this can help with recruiting and it's also a nice way for the team to summarize and share what they built.
ar_turnbull 12y ago
It's also relevant to the NYT's goal of surviving the digital shift. Giving the world a peek under the hood isn't just an interesting story, it's brand-building for a publication that wants to be seen as modern.
rajivpant 12y ago
Open sourcing it is a good suggestion and one that some have made previously. Open sourcing it requires a fair amount of work to remove company-specific, internal stuff and making it easy for others to install, upgrade and maintain it on their own. That fair amount of work hasn't yet made it high on a priority list, but let us hope it will :-)

jonaldomo 12y ago

I could see this as premium wordpress service successfully charging $15 - 25 a month for bloggers.

cliveowen 12y ago
I don't, and it would be too expensive even at $15 imo. But even if something like this had a market there's the problem of the editor, as it uses contenteditable which is at best inconsistent across browser and at worst completely broken. That's also the reason Google Docs dropped it and started doing editing the hard way. As long as you know who uses your software and you can enforce the use of a given browser (as is the case with the writers for the NYT) there's no problem with contenteditable, but for a general solution you need to drop it.
- volaski 12y ago
  ice plugin works for tinymce as well as contenteditable http://nytimes.github.io/ice/demo/ http://nytimes.github.io/ice/demo/

BrandonSmith 12y ago

The CMS is in a renaissance period with Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and the like falling out of favor. I believe the CMS is bifurcating into two specialized directions. Several online publishers are coming out and describing their new, home-grown custom CMS. The features are rich and provide robust, innovative tools across the long-form content lifecycle: writing, editing, and publication. There is special attention to collaboration. On the other hand, more and more website developers align themselves with the goals and properties of static site generators. SSGs are best suited what I call "malleable" websites. Thus, I think the way to think about this CMS renaissance is that traditional the CMS tried (and failed) to optimize for both long-form content and the malleable website. As a result, people are sick of trying to patch the traditional CMS with plugin after plugin and instead are simply crafting their own.

iancarroll 12y ago
> The CMS is in a renaissance period with Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and the like falling out of favor. I think Wordpress is still going to stay in the game. It still has a road ahead of it. I do think that the big newsrooms are going to expand past it's limiting multiple-people collaboration features into a new CMS, but most blogs will want to use WP.
snowwrestler 12y ago
I don't know about Joomla but Wordpress and Drupal are hardly falling out of favor; they're actually both growing quite rapidly. Developing a custom CMS makes sense for exactly one type of company: a publisher whose entire business depends on their CMS. For companies in that situation, developing a custom CMS is a capital investment in their core product. Everyone else will save time, money, and security headaches by building on a popular open source platform. Heck even Twitter uses Drupal to power their developer site.
- BrandonSmith 12y ago
  Ironically, I've heard the argument that, for the malleable website case, most people will save time, money, and security headaches by avoiding the traditional CMS. My point is that the traditional CMS is falling out of favor as the default solution for content on the Web. Need a blog? Wordpress is increasingly NOT the solution. As developers, we are trending away from the one-size-fits-all CMS and into specialized categories of CMS. The CMS renaissance is due to two factors: 1) A proliferation of great tools emerging into a toolchain ecosystems. Node's Grunt and Gulp are fine examples. This is largely different than the traditional CMS because... 2) Developers are increasingly wanting to gain more control over our craft.

nsher 12y ago

Looks like Drupal with a few node_hooks to me

burritofanatic 12y ago

I was always under the impression that they're Django/Python. Can anyone confirm?

krishy 12y ago
No. We use a pretty normal ("boring") Java stack with Spring, Hibernate and Jersey. Some of the older components use Struts + JSPs whereas the newer components use Backbone (and related libraries).
- augustl 12y ago
  Which database? A JDBC one?
  - lvnenchak 12y ago
    scoop uses mysql for its managed repository. we also use mongodb for our published repository that serves our apis to everybody else.
danso 12y ago
The NYT devs consist of several dev groups and a mix of stacks...some which are business-facing/product, and others that are in editorial (i.e. interactive news graphics). On the editorial side, they are one of the few in the news business that were using Ruby/Rails (the vast majority of newsrooms use Python/Django). There's also obviously a primarily-JavaScript group.
- superchink 12y ago
  See krishy's comment above. It looks like they do not use Ruby/Rails for the CMS for editors, but use Java instead.
  - danso 12y ago
    Right...I should've clarified...by "editorial", I meant the team that focuses on the public facing news projects, such as Derek Willis's campaign finance apps and utilities (http://itemizer.herokuapp.com/ http://itemizer.herokuapp.com/)...I don't think they do a lot of monolithic-type Rails apps currently, though, at least compared to client-side-heavy projects

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jawns 12y ago

Context: I'm a former copy editor with experience working for digital-only (e.g. Forbes.com) as well as print-driven magazines newspapers. One of the things that's difficult when designing a CMS that works for both digital and print is that there are far fewer space constraints online than in print, and you want to ultimately generate an article that works in both formats. (Oh, and on mobile, and in a condensed version in a sister publication, and an expanded version for the wire.) For hard news, the inverted pyramid format comes in handy -- if you don't have enough space in the print edition, you just lop off the last few paragraphs -- but for things like op/eds and magazine-style pieces, that doesn't always work. What I'd love to see is a CMS (and, more fundamentally, a way of representing the underlying data) in which writers and editors can designate certain paragraphs or sentences or phrases as more important than others, so that even a story with a complex format can be dynamically "scaled," sort of like what web designers do with media queries, or what image editors do with seam carving.

charonn0 12y ago
> a way of representing the underlying data in which writers and editors can designate certain paragraphs or sentences or phrases as more important than others Doesn't HTML do this? <h1> is more important than <h2>, etc.
- grrowl 12y ago
 You're missing the mark of this scenario — the headings are all more important than paragraphs, but maybe a summary or "background info" paragraph is clearly less integral than its nearby paragraphs, or maybe the second half of an intro feels a bit "fluffy" but still adds. If you have space constraints, they'd be the first priority to go.
- jawns 12y ago
 Well, yes, but in only the broadest sense possible. For the purposes of an op-ed piece or a feature story, though, you'd need to have much more control. Actually, this comment illustrates that such a system might not be as easy as you'd think. Some natural-language processing/generation would come in handy to ensure the following <num-of-bullets> things: * proper capitalization * subject/verb agreement * proper punctuation * number agreement

powera 12y ago

This appears to be unrelated to the Kuro5hin derived CMS named Scoop?

minikomi 12y ago

Are there any google docs based CMS's ? Seems like you could offload the editing, saving, tracking changes to google docs - a platform many people seem familiar with now - and then keep the actual CMS to a bare minimum. Have it import the text & spit out a static page even.

stdbrouw 12y ago
Bangor Daily News does all of their editing in Google Docs. They then feed things into WordPress and InDesign, but I imagine you could feed it into pretty much anywhere. http://dev.bangordailynews.com/2011/06/16/marrying-google-docs-and-wordpress-or-really-any-cms/ http://dev.bangordailynews.com/2011/06/16/marrying-google-do... http://toc.oreilly.com/2011/06/google-docs-wordpress-indesign-workflow.html http://toc.oreilly.com/2011/06/google-docs-wordpress-indesig...
amalag 12y ago
That is a very interesting idea, but since NYTimes opensourced their ICE editor, I am not sure what Google Docs would provide.
- minikomi 12y ago
  Transparent version control, tracking of changes, collaborative editing, familiar interface, familiar workflow (just drop finished articles into this directory to be available to the CMS)

Grue3 12y ago

It looks surprisingly nice for an in-house app. Usually there's no point to focus on web-design for these kind of apps since the public won't be able to see them anyway.