Design. Newspaper websites - tips for designing and developing

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    Just wondering if anyone has experience and tips for designing and developing a large, database-driven website for a major newspaper? Are there any good tricks for extensibility with regard to front end development? Is one specific open source CMS's best for this particular job?
    • CommentAuthorBen says…
    • CommentTimeJan 29th 2010 edited
     
    Wordpress?






















    Hahahahahahahahahahahaha.
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    Looking for something a little more powerful than WordPress, Benjamin.
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    Open source I would probably opt for ModX.

    Otherwise I would probably recommend Expression Engine.

    Saying that I would imagine if its a HUGE website there are specific news cms systems available that may be better for the job.
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    I wasn't really suggesting WP.

    Looking at the newspaper websites like The Sun etc, the CMS systems look bloody awful.

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    The Guardian built their own, and it seems if you want one that isn't a shoehorned system or something that is particularly sucky, you're best to as well. Unless your budget it pretty astronomical of course.

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    Open source I would probably opt for ModX.

    Otherwise I would probably recommend Expression Engine.


    Yeah, I was actually considering these two - in that order specifically!

    it seems if you want one that isn't a shoehorned system or something that is particularly sucky, you're best to as well.


    For flexibility, I was considering this too! It won't be anywhere near as big as the Guardian site but it'll be big enough. Was thinking maybe a custom-built Code Igniter CMS.

    Hard to know really - I'll have to evaluate MODx and EE a bit more to see if they can do what I need them to without too much painful modifying.

    The front end side of things is going to be something I'll want to concentrate on as well. I need to ensure that the templates provided are flexible enough to allow elements of the layout to be swapped in and out while maintaining aesthetics. I know Craig did an article on something similar in a previous issue of .net - I must dig that out.
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    I'd probably suggest EE or your own CI-built CMS. One thing to consider is how articles get added to the CMS: I was manager of the News Letter website (for my sins) many years back, and we used a great tool called Gemini that we used to highlight stories in the PDF version of the newspaper, and when we were done, it spat it all out into a text file that we uploaded to the CMS. So, that might have an impact as to what option you go for... Of course, it might not!
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    Development wise, Django was created specifically for this purpose. Though it'd have to be all custom built...
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    Django was also developed for 'tradiotional' news information organisation and delivery too: one of the things I'd be considering if I were you (assuming you have license to do so), is whether you want to do anything interesting with the organisation, search and delivery of the information. The Guardian do some very cool things with their CMS that you've only started to see the effects of recently -- while they have traditional 'sections', all of their news can be filtered through tags, RSS feeds of just about anything can be created by the end-user, and so on.

    Not sure how appropriate Django would be to delivering information in a more interesting way.

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