Open-Source News CMS being Developed by The Texas Tribune and The Bay Citizen

http://www.knightfoundation.org/news/press_room/knight_press_releases/detail.dot?id=378887

by tswicegood • 15 years ago

51 47 15 years ago

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

acangiano• 15 years ago

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.

natrius9• 15 years ago

There are several tools that let you put up a newspaper website today. I don't see anyone raving about any of them. They aren't built for news, and it shows. I've built newspaper sites on Wordpress, and while I might wish it on my worst enemy, I'd definitely spare the middle tier.

tswicegood5• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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?

kgtm• 15 years ago

I can't resist the urge to cry "Nokia!"...

RyanMcGreal2• 15 years ago

Any ideas yet on what technologies the developers will use?

tswicegood5• 15 years ago

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.

RyanMcGreal2• 15 years ago

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

nopal• 15 years ago

It also looks like it will proxy/CDN-friendly, with ESIs: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2313737 (that's just a link to jashkenas's comment on this page)

natrius9• 15 years ago

It's hard to be ESI-unfriendly. armstrong.esi is for letting developers take baby steps toward Varnish without having to complicate their server setup.

dalore• 15 years ago

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

megaman821• 15 years ago

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

natrius9• 15 years ago

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.

tswicegood5• 15 years ago

Yes. We did and we are. :-) No need to reinvent the wheel here, so we're using what already has a proven track record in the newsroom.

andrewf• 15 years ago

Varnish also came out of a newspaper - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varnish_(software)#History

cdr• 15 years ago

Sort of - the Lawrence Journal-World built a CMS and then split it into the newspaper-specific part (http://www.ellingtoncms.com/) and the more general part (Django). This Armstrong looks to be directly competing with Ellington.

shii• 15 years ago

Also see DocumentCloud[1] (of Backbonejs, Underscorejs, and other-great-tools fame). Came out of NYT programmers like jashkenas

[1] http://www.documentcloud.org/about [2]: http://www.documentcloud.org/opensource

jashkenas2• 15 years ago

DocumentCloud is also funded by the Knight Foundation, and hopefully there's some room for cooperation here.

We'll see how it pans out, but I for one would love for Armstrong to integrate with the DocumentCloud API, in order to provide seamless document management, OCR, search, and annotation for the primary source docs behind Armstrong articles. I've been talking to Travis about it -- perhaps it's a bit of code we can contribute to the project.

Other recent Knight-funded open source includes the excellent TileMill project:

http://mapbox.github.com/tilemill/

... which, in another bit of cooperation, uses Backbone.js for its editing interface: http://developmentseed.github.com/TileMill/docs/tilemill.htm...

natrius9• 15 years ago

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

tnorthcutt• 15 years ago

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.

joeybaker• 15 years ago

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

mgkimsal• 15 years ago

Sounds pretty awesome Travis - good luck with the project!

zlopid• 15 years ago

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 ).

tswicegood5• 15 years ago

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.

jashkenas2• 15 years ago

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)

jessedhillon2• 15 years ago

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

knieveltech5• 15 years ago

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.

natrius9• 15 years ago

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/).

knieveltech5• 15 years ago

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.

tvon• 15 years ago

Well, someone is jaded.

knieveltech5• 15 years ago

Miserably. It's a miracle (although disappointing) my misanthropy doesn't cause people to spontaneously combust. Upvoted.

natrius9• 15 years ago

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...

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.

look_lookatme• 15 years ago

A news CMS built using the tools that developers want to build news applications with is a huge win.

This is absolutely true. Find good PMs, developers and designers you trust to do good work, give them authority and time.

benohear• 15 years ago

Python aside, could you give us a couple of examples where a development would be made complicated by Drupal but would be easy on Armstrong?

knieveltech5• 15 years ago

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.

nonrecursive• 15 years ago

Django was originally created by programmers working for a newspaper in order to serve the needs of the newspaper: http://notesofgenius.com/django-web-framework/

kylemathews• 15 years ago

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.

animalmother• 15 years ago

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...

Open-Source News CMS being Developed by The Texas Tribune and The Bay Citizen

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