E-Media Tidbits

groups.drupal.org Morris Digital Works' Ken Rickard: One of the leaders in the effort to adapt Drupal to newspapers.

Many news organizations face a tough choice: Should they stick with their legacy proprietary CMS (which is probably geared primarily to support the print or broadcast product) or switch to an open-source CMS that puts online media first -- or at least on equal footing with traditional media production?

It's hard to turn away from a system that not only represents a huge sunk investment, but which might change how everyone in your organization works and interacts.

Some people in the news business are looking toward customizable open-source CMSs such as Drupal or Bricolage, or frameworks such as Django that can be used to build a CMS.

Placeblogger founder Lisa Williams recently told me about some current efforts to push the news CMS envelope. She mentioned that Morris Digital Works employee Ken Rickard recently contributed to the Drupal project a complete customization framework called MySite.

Williams explains, "A Drupal site with MySite enabled has MyYahoo!-like features that allow registered usersto customize their site experience."

Also, Williams noted: "If you consider Google a media company -- as some do -- the company is sponsoring 20 Summer of Code projects aimed at Drupal. These should upgrade a dizzying number of core elements and create new modules."I don't think Drupal is all that far from being a decent solution for newspapers. Some papers are already using it. I think if some money were spent on optimizing elements core to make Drupal faster, and on developing newspaper-specific modules in development like Tearsheet (which tags Web content for reverse publishing into the print paper), it would get the rest of the way there. It could be done in less than a year, and it could have an significant impact on news organizations."

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Williams recently won a Knight News Challenge grant to expand Placeblogger's development. As part of this effort, she plans to pitch in on Drupal development that might benefit news orgs.

"Knight asked us to put what we're doing in the public domain. For my project, developing tools (in part) in the form of new Drupal modules or enhancements to existing modules neatly solves this problem and ensures that it's available to a large community of developers and users -- a small but growing number of whom are news organizations. That might be a way to kill 38 birds with one stone."

Of course, open-source solutions aren't for everyone. In March, Tidbits contributor Rich Gordon wrote an article for the Readership Institute explaining why, after evaluating several CMS options (including open source ones) the Medill J-school selected Extron's CMS400.Net system.