
Open-Source News CMS being Developed by The Texas Tribune and The Bay Citizen - tswicegood
http://www.knightfoundation.org/news/press_room/knight_press_releases/detail.dot?id=378887
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jashkenas
Here are some Texas Tribune Github projects that appear to be pieces of
Armstrong:

<https://github.com/texastribune/armstrong.base> (base functionality)

<https://github.com/texastribune/armstrong.esi> (edge side includes)

<https://github.com/texastribune/armstrong.apps.couchdb> (couchdb views)

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jessedhillon
Oh thank God it's in Python! The last thing the world needs is another plate
of PHP spaghetti.

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knieveltech
Yeah, because, you know, Python (being a magical language) prevents spaghetti
implementations.

Spoken like someone who's tinkered with Wordpress for 20 minutes and decided
that was grounds to make sweeping assumptions. Drupal's internals are tight.
You ever hear a developer complaining about coding against it, guaranteed it's
because they don't know what they're doing.

~~~
jessedhillon
No, Python's not a magical language.

It's just that, for various reasons, when good programmers are given their
choice of language for a project they tend to choose Python and not PHP, or
Java, or BASIC. And that's just my experience, but I don't think I'm the only
one who's observed that.

Speaking of sweeping assumptions though: I've been a PHP developer since
version 3 and have deployed many WordPress sites, themes and extensions, going
back to version 2.1. I'm quite familiar with its internals, and while not to
the same extent, I am also experienced with Drupal.

I can say with certainty that if you are the kind of web developer who likes a
cleanly enforced separation of logic from presentation, or who enjoys being
able to predict with high accuracy the flow of control, you will be frustrated
with WordPress and Drupal -- and PHP apps in general. On the other hand, if
you like writing hook functions and embedding business logic in your
templates, you're in luck because the APIs of both do a very good job of
making this the default mode for development.

If we continue down this thread, we're going to have a language war; my main
intent was to disabuse you of the notion that people who criticize PHP speak
from ignorance, as I have been paid very well for a long time to perform all
sorts of PHP-related mental gymnastics. I absolutely refuse to use it for
personal projects and have scaled back the extent to which I use it at work,
by finding a job where I have more freedom with my projects.

I could go on about the nastiness of PHP, but if you don't believe that this
is the state of PHP CMS development -- perhaps you think that it's not bad to
write code this way, or perhaps you think all the hoops that one has to jump
through to do things The Right Way are not actually burdensome -- then we
simply disagree on what it means to have a good programming environment.

If you feel that way, I'd recommend a couple of PG's essays to you:

<http://paulgraham.com/avg.html> <http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html>

EDIT: Another thing occurs to me: there are a ton of environments and
frameworks where a 5 minute screencast is plenty convincing to someone looking
to try it out. You can show off some great concepts and capabilities in 5
minutes. So yeah, 20 minutes of trying to do something trivial in WordPress is
enough to get the gist of things -- if you can't find at least one great, if
minor, experience in 20 minutes of using a tool, it's probably a good
indication of things to come.

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knieveltech
Yet more comical blundering courtesy of an industry I do not miss working for.
For the cheap seats over at the Tribune:

1\. You can't afford the talent required to pull off a bespoke CMS.

2\. You can't afford the cost of lifecycle maintenance on a bespoke CMS.

3\. Newspaper editors make horrible PM's on software development projects.

Now that we've estabished your efforts are (at best) doomed to mediocrity drop
what you're doing immediately and go check out Pressflow. If that isn't
sufficiently "geared towards the newsroom" hire a couple of freelance
developers to cook up a few custom modules and you're done for 1/100th the
cost. Have a nice day.

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natrius
You make very important points. Upvoted.

> _1\. You can't afford the talent required to pull off a bespoke CMS._

> _2\. You can't afford the cost of lifecycle maintenance on a bespoke CMS._

Us at The Texas Tribune or potential Armstrong users? We're doing pretty fine
with our CMS. Armstrong users won't have to pay to maintain an entire CMS
since community maintenance should take care of most of their needs. They'll
have to pay to maintain their templates and additions to the CMS, _but they're
already paying for those with their current CMS_. I think Armstrong will end
up saving many news organizations money over going with a proprietary
solution.

> _3\. Newspaper editors make horrible PM's on software development projects._

Is this in regard to the Armstrong project itself or implementations of it?
There's little editorial interaction with Armstrong. We know what the two
newsrooms involved need, and we've already built a CMS that satisfies those
needs. Now we're abstracting out our unique needs and trying to anticipate the
places where other implementors will need to make customizations. I think
it'll work out fine.

 _Now that we've estabished your efforts are (at best) doomed to mediocrity
drop what you're doing immediately and go check out Pressflow._

No thanks. I and many other developers are more productive in Python than in
PHP. If there's a barrier between your CMS and the news applications you want
to integrate with it, you will be even less productive, and many possible
projects will be written off from the get go. (We could do everything in
PHP/Drupal, but no.) For more on that, see Matt Waite's recent article:
[http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/matt-waite-to-build-a-
digit...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/matt-waite-to-build-a-digital-
future-for-news-developers-have-to-be-able-to-hack-at-the-core-of-the-old-
ways/)

No developer in a news organization wants to be faced with an "All these
worlds are yours, except the CMS. Attempt no landings there" type of
situation. A news CMS built using the tools that developers want to build news
applications with is a huge win.

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knieveltech
After four years working in the industry I can say with confidence that in
100% of the news organizations I've interacted with humoring the developers
resulted in a disaster. Newspapers are not software shops.

From a business perspective there's no money in humoring the guys in the
development department on this one. Money's too scarce. It's cheaper and more
effective to can any dissidents, swap in competent PHP developers and go with
an implementation that minimizes wheel reinvention and the amount of code the
organization is responsible for maintaining.

~~~
natrius
Cheaper? Yes. More effective? Debatable. If a news organization is just trying
to put articles online, then sure, that approach works. If they want to push
the boundaries of what's possible in online journalism, you're not going to be
able to accomplish that by sticking the cheapest cogs in the machine.

Armstrong users will only have to maintain their templates and customizations.
This is a requirement no matter which CMS you pick.

~~~
knieveltech
I once cooked up an implementation targeted at the "Local Events" vertical. It
implemented 100% of Zvents feature set and took 15 hours to put together. That
tells me everything I need to know about effectiveness.

Basically my point boils down to this: there are freely available, insanely
flexible, totally customizable CMS's that have been under active development
for a decade or more. Given how long it takes to create truly polished
software of any kind, starting a CMS project from thin air doesn't make sense,
you're hundreds of thousands of developer hours behind existing projects on
day one.

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dalore
Wasn't this how Django was born? A news agency needed a CMS and django was
built.

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megaman821
The Texas Tribune uses Django right now. I wonder if they will be building a
CMS on top of it.

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natrius
We've built a CMS using Django, and we'll be taking it from a custom hack to
something that's widely usable, while fixing the gripes we've built up over
the past year and a half.

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acangiano
It will be interesting to see how much better this will be than a custom
installation of Wordpress with the proper plugins to achieve the same
functionality.

~~~
tswicegood
Wordpress is an amazing blogging system and it's coming into its own right as
a CMS, but it's not geared toward the newsroom. Armstrong (the name of the
project) is being built for the newsroom. Because of that, it probably won't
gain a ton of traction in the standard Drupal/Wordpress deployment area, but
that's fine by us. We're out to make the best news CMS, but the best generic
one.

That focus is what's sets us apart from many of the other open-source
offerings out there, in my opinion.

~~~
arkitaip
I am interested in CMSs and am curious to know how a cms for newsrooms
actually looks like? I am working on a Drupal implementation and believe
Drupal to be so generic that it can accommodate to any cluster of workflows -
but maybe you believe the overhead of generality is too much?

Maybe it would be more fruitful to invest that $975,000 in improving Drupal
and/or creating a installation profile for newsrooms?

~~~
coolgeek
Indeed, the OpenPublish Drupal distribution would seem to meet the
requirements stated.

Not to mention a 2-1/2 year head start on understanding and actually
delivering on user needs.

And a vastly larger developer base than this project will ever dream of
having.

It drives me friggin nuts when people declare the need to build new customized
WAFs and CMSs to meet their highly unique needs.

If OpenPublish doesn't meet your your needs, you can customize it for a lot
less than $1M.

Edit: Here's a good white paper from MediaCurrent

[http://www.mediacurrent.com/guide-large-scale-publishing-
dru...](http://www.mediacurrent.com/guide-large-scale-publishing-drupal)

And the distribution site:

<http://openpublishapp.com/>

~~~
natrius
I addressed this issue in this comment:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2314146>

------
natrius
If working on this or the various news applications we put out at The Texas
Tribune appeals to you, note that we're hiring: <http://trib.it/ttdevjob>.
Bonus points if you're in town for SXSW and want to talk. Email me
(nbabalola@texastribune.org) and/or show up to the Knight Foundation's Media
Innovation party on Saturday (<http://www.mediainnovationparty.com/>).

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tnorthcutt
I just read this article yesterday about news org CMSs: <http://bit.ly/gcrZgN>

Should be interesting to see what they come up with. Are there plans to do
new/innovative things, such as automating inclusion of crime data, as the
author in that article talks about?

Is there any further information about costs? $975,000 seems like a lot to
develop a CMS, but perhaps that's not all going to pay for development...?

Edit: I see now that although the linked article from the OP says "will
develop", the Armstrong site says the first release will be this June and that
the 'base of Armstrong' has been powering the contributing organizations'
websites since 2009.

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zlopid
It's "open-source" but the source isn't available and there's no way to
contribute? Their website (armstrongcms.org) mentions they have a GitHub page,
but it's not linked, and I'm not finding anything from searching repositories
for "Armstrong."

EDIT: Ah, I see my GitHub search-fu is not strong, but jashkenas' is (
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2313737> ).

~~~
tswicegood
We're still in the process of getting everything setup. This is literally
_just_ today public. We'll be getting code setup with the ability to
contribute and proper links on the website over the next few days to week.

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joeybaker
Again? The last time worked so well: <http://www.populousproject.com>

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kylemathews
There's another Open Source News CMS with a ton of traction already Open
Publish - <http://openpublishapp.com/>

"The Nation", "The New Republic", "Japan Week" and a bunch of others use it.

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RyanMcGreal
Any ideas yet on what technologies the developers will use?

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tswicegood
I'm one of the devs on the project. It's Django/Python-based. That provides an
amazing platform for newsrooms and their diverse needs, so we're just building
on top of it.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Excellent! I'm a big fan of Python for web development.

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natrius
More information, including a few technical details, is here:
<http://armstrongcms.org/>

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animalmother
I work for The Bay Citizen and we're hiring developers. Email me
(sshifflett@baycitizen.org) or check out the post on our site...
[http://www.baycitizen.org/about/careers/senior-software-
engi...](http://www.baycitizen.org/about/careers/senior-software-engineer/)

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mgkimsal
Sounds pretty awesome Travis - good luck with the project!

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davidcoallier
Congrats Travis! Can't wait to see what comes out of it.

