http://www.inside.com/story/Story_Cached/0,2770,6358,00.html

> The Ugly Secret Behind Top Media Sites
> By Jimmy Guterman
>
> Wednesday, July 05 09:56 a.m.
>
> Ask anyone who works on the editorial or design side of a media
> Web site what the worst part of their job is. After they exhaust
> themselves on the number of hours they work and how little their
> options are now worth, talk often turns to the publishing tools
> they use to manage their site and how much they hate them.

I wonder why commercial Web publishing systems suck so much.

At WWW9 I talked to a guy from the online department of a large
British newspaper about this same topic: web publishing systems
they've used, how they all sucked and were expensive anyway, etc.

> Building and maintaining a large-scale media site that performs
> quickly, reliably and takes advantage of the Web has turned into
> big business for a group of software companies (and associated
> integrators and consultants) that build large, custom
> (''packaged'') applications, often atop popular database systems,
> intended to bring order to an unruly process.
>
> Some media sites entered these waters modestly -- the initial
> version of forbes.com was powered by NetObjects Fusion, a
> single-user desktop package -- but from 1996 on many large,
> high-traffic media sites have chosen large-scale systems,
> complete with application servers, that cost hundreds of
> thousands of dollars or more.  CNet spun off its in-house
> content-management program to create Vignette, which quickly
> gained a high-profile media client in the Chicago Tribune for its
> StoryServer (a product now called V/5).  (Inside also has been a
> client of Vignette.) FutureTense developed a comparable system
> customized for media sites and found its flagship customer in the
> Washington Post.  If Vignette's current market cap, just shy of
> $10 billion despite its stock being half off its high, is any
> indication, this is a good business to be in.

I didn't know that about CNet and Vignette... funny for a small
publisher's internal publishing tools to be spunoff into a
company that big.

> It's so attractive because media Web sites (and others) need what
> these complex, high-end products claim to offer: multi-user
> systems that pull the elements of Web pages out of databases and
> provide a workflow system that lets programmers, designers and
> editors see where in the production process any element resides.
>
> Yet the impressive client list that made these companies is,
> slowly, defecting. Tribune Interactive, which runs
> chicagotribune.com, is in the process of moving off Vignette to a
> home-grown platform, as is CNet itself. Similarly,
> washingtonpost.com is said to be walking away from a reported
> seven-figure investment in customizing the FutureTense product
> (now owned by OpenMarket) in favor of a system its employees and
> contractors are building. ''We couldn't wait for them to fix all
> the problems anymore,'' says one person familiar with the
> washingtonpost.com decision to build its own system. ''There are
> profound holes in their system, like workflow, which is the most
> important part of a content-management system. I mean, come on
> already.''
>
> The head of product development at one New York-based media site
> who has supervised development on both homegrown and packaged
> systems says: ''These programs are huge, expensive and about as
> useless and clumsy as you can imagine.  Never again, I promise
> you.''
>
> According to one chicagotribune.com editor, ''We used the
> official Vignette system in their custom application and it was
> just terrible. Then our staff put a huge amount of effort into
> customizing it so it would work the way we needed it to, right
> inside a Web browser. That worked much better. Now they're
> extending that effort, just not with StoryServer underneath it.''
>
> If people are abandoning these platforms, why is Vignette worth
> nearly $10 billion?  Perhaps, as one media-company technical
> manager explains, it's because ''it takes a long time to convince
> people that all the marketing they've heard is crap. A lot of
> these executives who don't know much about technology, don't know
> what you mean when you tell them that proprietary templating
> languages are dead or something like that. When it comes to
> understanding these systems, a lot of them are asleep.''
>
> Want an example? ''We're extremely committed to the Vignette
> platform,'' says an Internet CEO to me a year ago who had
> recently signed a large six-figure check for the system. ''What
> does the Vignette platform do?'' I asked him. After an
> uncomfortable 10 seconds, he moved his hands in circles and said,
> ''You know, puts the stuff up.''
>
> So what are the options for a large media site that wants the
> flexibility these systems promise but not the headaches? Since
> the packaged systems work with content that has been entered into
> structured databases like those from IBM, Oracle and Sybase, the
> data can be moved to a new system. Some large sites have
> discovered that the Unix file system is a cranky beast, but it's
> not such a bad way to organize files. Using HTML templates or
> server-side includes (which allow you to use the same pieces of
> HTML in multiple Web pages), sites can get some subset of the
> features of commercial publishing systems.
>
> For higher-level issues like workflow, some are turning to
> next-generation solutions like Allaire's Spectra, which, although
> relatively young, seem to have learned from the more blatant
> drawbacks in their predecessors, and Adobe's InCopy system for
> letting editorial and design pros work quickly without bumping
> into one another too frequently. Some are considering more
> frankly customized-from-the-start solutions like the ArsDigita
> Community System, which has the added cachet of being open source
> and more easily tweaked without having to wait for the supposed
> experts from the vendor to show up.
>
> In the long run, it's likely that more and more media sites will
> build (or contract out and supervise) their own solutions, built
> around standards like Java Server Pages that aren't dependent on
> one company for development and support. Since all the packaged
> systems need so much customization, you might as well build your
> system in your own idiosyncratic image from the start. It's where
> you're going to end up anyway.

I think I read that ArsDigita is planning for their ACS to compete
in this space, in which case there will be an open source toolkit
that each of these companies can use and contribute to instead of
hacking up their own.

(as far as I understand, it's just regular web publishing with a
bit of extra stuff to manage the editorial process, doesn't seem
difficult to me.)

--
Gerald Oskoboiny <[email protected]>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/