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Good Software for Editorial Management? 36

Posted by Cliff from the a-whip-to-tame-those-lazy-writers dept.
cardoso asks: "I'm editor of a Brazilian news site, with a few permanent writers and a dozen occasional collaborators, and all the assignments are hand-made. I wrote a few queries for productivity stats (thanks heaven for MySQL), but the everyday tasks are not automated. What I really need is software to organize the stories: who's doing what, deadlines, production stats and assignments. It may be standalone or a Drupal module. I tried all the popular project packages, but they're too generic. Are there any solutions specially crafted to the online publishing market?"
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Good Software for Editorial Management? More

Good Software for Editorial Management?

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  • Ellington (Score:4, Informative)

    by RunFatBoy.net ( 960072 ) * on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @12:02AM (#15618305)
    If you have 10K to drop, try out Ellington ( http://www.ellingtoncms.com/ [ellingtoncms.com] ).

    Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ [runfatboy.net] -- Exercise for the rest of us.
    • If you have 10K to drop, try out Ellington ( http://www.ellingtoncms.com/ [ellingtoncms.com]).
      A little question:

      Is better this Ellington soft than have your own designed online publishing system?
      With 10K you can pay a group of developers to do something really good, right?

    • Re:Ellington (Score:2, Informative)

      by nequeo ( 699468 )
      Ellington is based on Django (http://www.djangoproject.com), and seems to be well suited for creating "CMS-y" type applications. I've had a little play with it myself, and like what I've seen so far. If you're end up deciding to 'roll your own', I'd definately take a look at Django over PHP as a starting point.
    • If you have a few hundred grand to drop, try Vignette's software.

      I've never understood why they refuse to do a lower end product...

  • pear.php.net (Score:4, Informative)

    by mr_stinky_britches ( 926212 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @12:08AM (#15618332) Homepage Journal
    Well, if you can do some SQL and basic OO programming...I recommend looking into the database packages over at http://pear.php.net [php.net]. Specifically, the DB_DataObject and related packages make creating a simple database and user interface for this pretty easy. Probably 1 or 2 days work if you know what you're doing, tops.
    And if you think it is a little beyond your current skillset, perhaps you can find a developer who has worked w/ the pear libraries before to create it for you (I'm sure they have a mailing-list that would be useful for you, asl well).
    Good luck!
  • Nary an error slips by it...

  • You can't fool us (Score:5, Funny)

    by $RANDOMLUSER ( 804576 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @12:25AM (#15618418)
    Cmdr. Taco, we know it's you.

  • Bricolage (Score:4, Informative)

    by grcumb ( 781340 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @12:37AM (#15618484) Homepage Journal

    Bricolage [bricolage.cc] has a lot of what you're looking for, and it's very well built.

    Here is a good intro [perl.com] to what it is and how it works.

  • Basecamp (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jaza ( 178039 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @12:48AM (#15618538)

    It sounds like what you're really looking for is a project management solution. Assigning tasks (such as 'write a story about x', 'cover the situation in y for the next 2 weeks'), settings deadlines, and co-ordinating groups or individuals - this all has very little to do with 'content management' as most people think about it.

    Drupal has you covered with organising your content (taxonomy), tracking history and versioning, and establishing an editorial workflow (actions and workflow). But it doesn't have project management well covered (the 'project module' is too specific to software development), and there are no Drupal modules that I'm aware of, for integrating such management with actual content handling.

    I think that Basecamp [basecamphq.com] would do the job best for you. It has all these PM facilities, in a very intuitive and easy interface.

  • Its possible that if you take a Wiki approach and misuse the media wiki engine you could get the effect you wanted through easy to use O.S. packages...

    I've taken this approach for clients looking at managing online publications however I understand it's definately not "one size fits all".

  • Review Site for Open Source CMS (Score:5, Informative)

    by carpeweb ( 949895 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @01:17AM (#15618650) Journal
    This doesn't cover all the CMS you might want to investigate (nothing costing $10K, for instance, in case that really is something you want), but http://opensourcecms.com/ [opensourcecms.com] has dozens of systems installed for demo use, so you might be able to get a sense of whether one of them would be appropriate. I have found that the demo versions don't have all the modules, so it wouldn't surprise me if you can't actually "test drive" any project management modules for the systems. For general demo, though, it's pretty cool.

    One of the volunteers on that site also runs http://ongetc.com/ [ongetc.com], which has summary information on a few more CMS possibilities. The first site is restricted to open source tools that use PHP/MySQL. The second site seems less restrictive. I'm still looking for more general sources.

  • two other cms (Score:2, Informative)

    by Abstract ( 12510 )
    As you already use the Drupal CMS you probably don't want to switch to another CMS. However if you do, you may want to take a look at these other options:

    * http://www.mmbase.org/ [mmbase.org]
    * http://typo3.com/ [typo3.com]

    Both are open source packages, and both are very feature rich. I also believe both offer some form of work flow management.
    I'm not sure because during my evaluation I noticed both packages had too many features for my use. I ended up using Drupal.
  • I hear iWebpress has extensive features for managing assignments, deadlines, etc. http://www.iwebpress.com/ [iwebpress.com]

  • Zope/Plone (Score:2, Informative)

    by be_kul ( 718053 )
    It sounds to me that he rather needs a CMS for managing online content, not really a project co-ordination system. Therefore, Zope/Plone as front-end to the already existing (?) MySQL-database should be fine: comes with a lot of managing tools, workflow template etc. and allows easy customization. And it's free. And: there is a strong, large, and friendly community helping to fix any problem very fast. For the 10k (US-$?) he could get a lot of additional work done if needed. Ah, yes: And one of the main Plo
  • http://www.slashcode.com/ [slashcode.com]
    It's the same code Slashdot uses and, from the layout of your website, looks just like what you'd want. However, I'm 99% sure it's in English, and there might not be translations available to where the UI is in your language. Although, it might be in a format where it doesn't matter what language you use, I'm not sure.
  • Kuro5hin runs a community based system for writing. These days it's mostly oil conspiracy and other political nonsense, but this situation probably arose after personal blogs became popular. Anyways, it's got a lot of extra features that make sense for internet collaboration, so you'd have to check it out to make sure it makes sense for your organization. I'm sure some of them make some good sense, like an editing mode where others can make suggestions for improvement, and some of the others might need more
  • Don't you want to be like Rob and Cmdr Taco?
  • Might want to have a look at CoFAX [cofax.org]. It a Java CMS designed specifically for newspapers, and unlike Ellington, doesn't cost you a kidney.

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