Building a Better Submission Form

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/building-a-better-submission-form/

by meghan • 16 years ago

53 18 16 years ago

open.blogs.nytimes.com

fr0man• 16 years ago

Nifty, but I could see this causing aggravation on the backend (i.e. using the data from one generation of your form to another). Still, very flexible.

knieveltech3• 16 years ago

Entirely typical for the industry, they waste untold developer hours dicking around with a single feature when the could have just installed an open source CMS and gotten the feature (and all kinds of other stuff) as part of the package. Grade: D

jcapote• 16 years ago

Yea, cause the New York Times could totally run off a simple Drupal install...

Grade: F

knieveltech3• 16 years ago

Actually, I'm quite confident the Times website and their cluster of associated web services could, in fact, run off of a Drupal install. Care to share your thoughts on why that wouldn't work? How much experience do you have with Drupal? With building newspaper websites?

Full disclosure: I'm a co-maintainer of 8 contributed modules for Drupal and have 3.5 years experience building websites and associated services (with a variety of tools, including Drupal) for the 3rd largest newspaper conglomerate in North America.

coolnewtoy• 16 years ago

http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2006/mar/29/scripps/

apparently several newspapers run off a Django install, including the newspaper that employed the web developers who wrote it:

http://notesofgenius.com/django-web-framework

ryanwaggoner4• 16 years ago

I have no idea why you're getting so many upvotes. I have yet to see anything about NYTimes.com that would preclude it running on Drupal. It seems to be working for whitehouse.gov, fastcompany.com, thenation.com, economist.com, and quite a few other high traffic sites.

EDIT: And I also have done Drupal development for several high-traffic magazine and newspaper sites that get millions of monthly visitors.

kj12345• 16 years ago

I think this is a great example of a form mapping more cleanly to a key value store than a relational DB. Submissions to forms like this are documents in the sense that they need to be recorded as-is. If the user moves or changes their name down the line its actually a feature and not a bug that these records won't be updated.

sekou• 16 years ago

Besides the scalability of non-relational data stores, would the increased flexibility in object creation and modification be enough of a reason to make the switch? Would object-relational mapping be a comparable solution?

misterbwong• 16 years ago

It depends :)

If your data doesn't lend itself to an RDB schema, go with a NoSql/key value store.

Building a Better Submission Form

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