
Lawrence Journal-World gets out of the CMS business, losing WordPress, etc - iProject
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/06/the-lawrence-journal-world-gets-out-of-the-cms-business-losing-out-to-freebies-like-wordpress/
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estenh
Every 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.

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mcantelon
Open sourcing Ellington might help grow the userbase which could lead to
maintenance contracts, contracts for adding features, etc.

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scribu
Ellington is built on top of Django, so the generic parts have already been
open-sourced.

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mcantelon
Django is a framework and Ellington is an application. Both frameworks and
applications can be open sourced.

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posabsolute
"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.

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gomox
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.

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tpiddy
A 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.

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ryanwaggoner
I have a couple questions about this; could you email me at mail at [my-
username] dot com? I'm just really interested in the local web media industry.

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emperorcezar
The issue with Ellington has always been it's closed source nature. You make a
lot of money from people who install, setup, and use your CMS/app/whatever who
need a support contract later on.

If you have to pay up front, you're much more likely to go with something like
Wordpress.

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lkrubner
This was an earlier conversation on the related subject of using a CMS for a
big site:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2764850>

