Lawrence Journal-World gets out of the CMS business, losing WordPress, etc
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Re: Lawrence Journal-World gets out of the CMS business, losing WordPress, etc
#2Open sourcing Ellington might help grow the userbase which could lead to maintenance contracts, contracts for adding features, etc.
Re: Lawrence Journal-World gets out of the CMS business, losing WordPress, etc
#3"We think a lot of our Ellington product and think it’s one of the tops in our industry"
Frankly, I don't think so, and that's probably the problem.
I could be wrong but most companies management that got a baked CMS think they got the most powerful, frikking awesome, and it general it's just a soup of unmanageable legacy code.
Of course there is a lot of other problems that could spring like a bad sales teams, but if the platform awesome ido not see why it should not be striving since it has been online for so long.
Re: Lawrence Journal-World gets out of the CMS business, losing WordPress, etc
#4Open sourcing Ellington might help grow the userbase which could lead to maintenance contracts, contracts for adding features, etc.
Ellington is built on top of Django, so the generic parts have already been open-sourced.
Re: Lawrence Journal-World gets out of the CMS business, losing WordPress, etc
#5"We think a lot of our Ellington product and think it’s one of the tops in our industry" Frankly, I don't think so, and that's probably the problem. I could be wrong but most companies management that got a baked CMS think they got the most powerful, frikking awesome, and it general it's just a soup of unmanageable legacy code. Of course there is a lot of other problems that could spring like a bad sales teams, but i…
Honestly if Djang is any indication of the development skills of the team I highly doubt the codebase is a huge mess. There are not many organizations where the development of an in-house tool spins off a high quality framework that becomes a mainstream tool.
Re: Lawrence Journal-World gets out of the CMS business, losing WordPress, etc
#6Open sourcing Ellington might help grow the userbase which could lead to maintenance contracts, contracts for adding features, etc.
Ellington is built on top of Django, so the generic parts have already been open-sourced.
Django is a framework and Ellington is an application. Both frameworks and applications can be open sourced.
Re: Lawrence Journal-World gets out of the CMS business, losing WordPress, etc
#7Every news organization that I've talked to that's used Ellington loves it. If they want to seriously make a change for the better in an industry dominated by antiquated CMSs that users hate, they need to open-source it. Hopefully they make the right choice here.
Re: Lawrence Journal-World gets out of the CMS business, losing WordPress, etc
#8"We think a lot of our Ellington product and think it’s one of the tops in our industry" Frankly, I don't think so, and that's probably the problem. I could be wrong but most companies management that got a baked CMS think they got the most powerful, frikking awesome, and it general it's just a soup of unmanageable legacy code. Of course there is a lot of other problems that could spring like a bad sales teams, but i…
Echoing the other poster here, I think it's naive to assume that it's failing due to a low-quality codebase for a variety of reasons. It's largely the same developers that brought us Django, but more to the point, even if it had the ugliest code base known to man, that wouldn't impact sales.
What they're likely running into is in trying to compete with 'good enough' blogging platforms. Ellington is positioned awkwardly outside the high end of consumer-grade blogging and well below the low end for most enterprise-class CMSes. The customers they have are elephants, and unless you have a specifically tailored sales team, elephant hunting is a very hard business to be in, especially for the kind of product that Ellington is, wherein it is not solving any core business needs for anybody except, probably, other newspapers and journals and the like.
Re: Lawrence Journal-World gets out of the CMS business, losing WordPress, etc
#9A few years ago, I used to work for a large local newspaper/TV media holding company with about 70 web properties.
In the 1.5 years I was there, they had about 6 CMS in action. IPS(i think?), ExpressionEngine, Day CQ, Wordpress and Ellington.
Smaller TV affiliates and publications are moving to Wordpress because of its price and how easy it is to find support/developers with experience.
If I remember correctly, the company I was previously with left Ellington to develop their own CMS features on top of Django.
Re: Lawrence Journal-World gets out of the CMS business, losing WordPress, etc
#10This was an earlier conversation on the related subject of using a CMS for a big site: