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Scoop: A Glimpse Into the NYTimes CMS

open.blogs.nytimes.com

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Re: Scoop: A Glimpse Into the NYTimes CMS

#21

Post by edavis »

chestnut-tree wrote: post #18
smacktoward wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would humbly suggest that static site generators are not nearly as popular as you might think if you only view the CMS market through the eyes of the HN crowd. SSGs are hugely popular among nerds and practically unknown among everybody else. The result is a kind of distortion where, to nerds, it looks like SSGs are about to take over the world -- "all my friends use them!" But step outside that tight network of peo…

I agree - I find the idea of static site generators (SSGs) very appealing, but they are not user-friendly to setup - unless you happen to be technically-minded. Some tell-tale signs that SSGs are made by programmers for other programmers: command line-installation and configuration, a liking for markdown (and a dislike for WYSIWYG). Just to be clear, I'm not knocking any of this. The fact that people have put their o…

> What would it take to make an SSG appeal to a broader set of users?

I don't think the SSG, as they largely exist today, will ever gain widespread usage by mainstream users.

But one thing that could drive greater adoption would be to develop an aesthetically pleasing web front-end that lets users write content using familiar WYSIWYG tools, but save the content to local files instead of a database. From there, the process would be largely the same as it is now: transform this directory of lightly marked up plain text files into raw HTML.

So, to answer your question: Make it more like Wordpress.

Re: Scoop: A Glimpse Into the NYTimes CMS

#22

Post by programminggeek »

BrandonSmith wrote: post #4

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…

Wordpress is not falling out of favor. If anything it's eating the lunch of a lot of previously custom or nonexistant CMS solutions. For small business, it's just getting started.

Re: Scoop: A Glimpse Into the NYTimes CMS

#23

Post by fleaflicker »

keehun wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: Scoop: A Glimpse Into the NYTimes CMS

#24

Post by snide »

BrandonSmith wrote: post #4

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…

Heh. You might find my CMS (http://www.webhook.com) funny then. It's a CMS based on static-site-generator concepts... it deploys static websites for example and is easy to use and malleable. However it still has a firebase backend and a traditional /cms/ page with all the modern trappings you'd expect.

So I kind of went for both :)

Re: Scoop: A Glimpse Into the NYTimes CMS

#25

Post by knieveltech »

snowwrestler wrote: post #13
BrandonSmith wrote: post #4

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…

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…

None of the metrics I've seen outside of Acquia marketing materials suggest Drupal is growing. Developer engagement plateaued a couple years ago if Google keyword searches and module issue queues are anything to go by. The number of purely Drupal dev shops have plummeted over the last few years. Job postings (locally and elsewhere) appear to be limited to well-established large enterprise and .edu, and regional shops that service these markets.

Wordpress, on the other hand, appears to be on fire.

Re: Scoop: A Glimpse Into the NYTimes CMS

#26

Post by BrandonSmith »

snide wrote: post #24
BrandonSmith wrote: post #4

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…

Heh. You might find my CMS ( http://www.webhook.com ) funny then. It's a CMS based on static-site-generator concepts... it deploys static websites for example and is easy to use and malleable. However it still has a firebase backend and a traditional /cms/ page with all the modern trappings you'd expect. So I kind of went for both :)

Ooohh. I like where your head is with webhook.com. (How did you get that domain!) I would have backed your campaign had I been exposed to it. Any way to join late?

Alright... hear me out... thoughts on combining webhook.com with Atom as a single download/install. There are custom Atom packages that provide UI to achieve what you are doing through the CLI. Preview locally, too.

Re: Scoop: A Glimpse Into the NYTimes CMS

#27

Post by BrandonSmith »

edavis wrote: post #21
chestnut-tree wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree - I find the idea of static site generators (SSGs) very appealing, but they are not user-friendly to setup - unless you happen to be technically-minded. Some tell-tale signs that SSGs are made by programmers for other programmers: command line-installation and configuration, a liking for markdown (and a dislike for WYSIWYG). Just to be clear, I'm not knocking any of this. The fact that people have put their o…

> What would it take to make an SSG appeal to a broader set of users? I don't think the SSG, as they largely exist today, will ever gain widespread usage by mainstream users. But one thing that could drive greater adoption would be to develop an aesthetically pleasing web front-end that lets users write content using familiar WYSIWYG tools, but save the content to local files instead of a database. From there, the pr…

There is no doubt that SSGs will "grow up" and appear to gain features like Wordpress. The difference will be that SSGs are born out of loosely coupled tools in a toolchain ecosystem. Over time, I believe the successful SSGs will have a decidedly Unix flavor to them. Take http://www.metalsmith.io/ as an example.

Re: Scoop: A Glimpse Into the NYTimes CMS

#28

Post by BrandonSmith »

gexla wrote: post #20
BrandonSmith wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

No way, building a custom CMS for a site which would have always been a good candidate for an off-the-shelf CMS is just as bad of an idea today as it ever has been. > As developers, we are trending away from the one-size-fits-all CMS and into specialized categories of CMS. Most of the sites which would typically get built on Drupal (and especially Wordpress) aren't owned by developers. Further, these owners probably…

I agree that building a custom CMS is not the right answer in most circumstances. I'm not advocating building custom CMS. My position is that what has "always been a good candidate for an off-the-shelf CMS" is evolving. The traditional CMS will be losing ground at the high and low ends. On the high-end, long-form content organizations striving to differentiate are building their own systems focused on collaboration and content lifecycle features and, on the low-end, static site generators for custom websites. There is a middle, but the middle, over time, appears to be shrinking.

Re: Scoop: A Glimpse Into the NYTimes CMS

#29

Post by ar_turnbull »

keehun wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: Scoop: A Glimpse Into the NYTimes CMS

#30

Post by jawns »

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.

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