Lawrence Journal-World gets out of the CMS business, losing WordPress, etc | Hacker News Reader

Lawrence Journal-World gets out of the CMS business, losing WordPress, etc

niemanlab.org

57 pointsiProject11 comments

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.

Open 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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com