DISCOVER Magazine, one of the most widely read science mags in the US, had out grown its dated Web Content Management infrastructure for www.discovermagazine.com. Times were changing, multi-media was big and in general Web and CMS technology had moved forward significantly.
After analyzing current needs and taking stock of the Web CMS landscape DISCOVER ultimately selected the open source Plone platform. This is a two-part series where we look at the CMS features which convinced DISCOVER to chose Plone.
Plone (plone.org) was chosen because of the system's ease-of-use, robust feature set, strong open source community, reduced vendor lock-in, outstanding customizability, standards compliance, reputation, economics, and high performance.
Key Points
- DISCOVER chose Plone for its ease-of-use, robust feature set, strong open source community, reduced vendor lock-in, outstanding customizability, standards compliance, reputation, economics, and high performance.
- Before Plone, it took DISCOVER up to three weeks to publish a magazine issue online. With Plone, that has been cut to as few as three days.
- Plone’s WYSIWYG editor greatly facilitates the management of the site for non-technical users and enforces design consistency.
- Plone automatically generates related articles for each of the thousands of articles on the site. No manual intervention is required.
- Video and multi-media content is easily managed
- Thousands of articles were successfully and automatically migrated from DISCOVER's old CMS into Plone with no loss of inbound links.
Managing the Website
A major consideration in deploying Plone was the platform's ease-of-use for website editors and content managers. Amos Kenigsberg, DISCOVER's Web Editor specifically mentioned Plone's “very intuitive interface” and “simple and clear file structure” as two reasons why he strongly prefers Plone over DISCOVER's previous CMS, a closed, proprietary system.
“Compared to our previous CMS,” said Kenigsberg, “Plone is very 'webby'. It's a much more web-standard interface so I don't have to learn an entirely new UI (User Interface) that I'm not used to. There are no fiddly controls that operate on their own UI logic. It almost feels like you're editing the web page right on the page itself, without any seams between editing and viewing. With our old CMS, editing was completely separate from viewing – it had a completely different appearance, interface and UI logic.”
Plone's ease-of-use allows all DISCOVER editors to start managing the site quickly and everyone to work more efficiently.
In Design Integration: Automatic Import of an Entire Issue
New articles can be added to the site either manually by the site editor, or automatically by importing from a series of In Design files. This automatic article entry is especially useful if an editor wants to add all articles from the print magazine at once. In fact, this feature reduced the amount of time the DISCOVER staff needs each month to publish an issue from 2 to 3 weeks down to 3 to 5 days.
With a single click, content editors can import an entire issue into Plone
Articles added to Plone are not visible to the public until the web editor chooses to manually publish the issue. This gives the web editors time to choose an article's channels and sub-channels, tweak the look-and-feel, fix any typos, and set any web-specific content or meta-data such as a RSS description or editor-chosen related articles. Issues and articles can be published instantly or scheduled for a future date and time.
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