CoPress

Daniel asked me to write up some thoughts about internal CMS development after we recently went through the process here in Spokane. For years, we’d been publishing on a fairly cluttered newspaper site running ASP and SQL Server. We were (and are) a pretty small staff, but in December we relaunched our main news site powered by Django ponies. I’ll share a bit about our development process – if you’re considering something similar, maybe you’ll find this helpful.

Where We Began: Decisions Before Coding

Our project started with a pretty traditional task force, assigned to explore and present options to the executives at our company. We had put off a site redesign for quite a while, knowing that while we might be able to dress up an ASP site in prettier templates, that wouldn’t give us the security we needed, or a platform capable of features that readers have come to expect. That required a complete technology overhaul. We had a few “musts” in mind, things like:

• Pretty URLs, and the SEO that comes with them. No more story.asp?ID=23984.
• The ability to do custom data design and specialized apps. The traditional newspaper content types – stories, videos, blog posts, etc. – don’t cover all the fun stuff (like pet names databases) or all the serious stuff (like a news report on diploma mill recipients)
• Getting into a development framework with an active user base. (Ever tried to find troubleshooting help on your ASP-powered image uploader? Good luck)

And so on. I’m sure our list of “musts” looked pretty much like yours would. We investigated a couple mass-market CMS options, but didn’t find any that were even close to providing the flexibility we wanted. (Not to mention, pbcs.dll does not a pretty URL make.) That left us with open-source systems, and I was pretty sure from the start that we’d end up wanting to go Django. For any Drupal fans out there, we certainly thought it was a good option – Django’s strengths just matched up with ours in a better way. It more than answered our needs.
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