France24 using Drupal
Dries Buytaert
Dries is the founder and project lead of Drupal and co-founder of Acquia and Mollom.
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Drupal is a Registered Trademark of Dries Buytaert.
Any clues as to why they switched? Code maintenance, performance, scalability, ...? There might be some valuable lessons to be learned by the broader community, so if you are at liberty to divulge anything, let us know.
May 8, 2008 - 21:13And the announcement about the Magnolia implementation is from February 2007 - barely a year ago. Given that a typical large scale implementation takes at least 6 months to go from concept to implementation to test to production...they switched and they switched pretty quickly. It may have been a business decision rather than a technological one - i.e. "well, the new CIO hates Java so we have to move all applications to something other than Java."
May 9, 2008 - 11:32I once had Magnolia in an evaluation process, and I liked it's simplicity a lot. But Magnolia heavily relies on the Web 1.0 approach - building pages and fill them with content. It falls short when it comes to flexiblity and reuse of content, and this is true for most of all the CMS I have ever used. None of them has Drupal's flexibility in organising content (content *management* in it's true meaning), and this is more important in daily work than Drupals weaknesses (e.g. file management)
May 11, 2008 - 15:12Lots of big media players are seriously looking at Drupal - it just makes so much sense. At AlJazeera my team is working on a small project that we're building on Drupal. If it were up to me I'd rip out every last instance of the archaic CMS we use for web publishing and rebuild the site with a couple of views, panels and nodequeue goodness...
May 13, 2008 - 13:32That's great news, congratulations. Whilst resisting the urge to become a Druapl fan-boy (as if), it really does seem that the move to Drupal is gaining enormous momentum.
Mohamed, it would be a world of awesome if AlJazeera moved to Drupal. It really is one of the best and honest news sites in the world.
May 15, 2008 - 02:53Great seeing you last week.
Here is my take on France24: Magnolia Publishes Roadmap, Loses Reference Site.
May 15, 2008 - 03:10Hi everybody, sorry for the delay -- I was on holiday when this post has been published by Dries.
I just posted an answer on mikiane.com: http://www.mikiane.com/node/2008/05/22/pourquoi-et-comment-france-24-uti... (It's in French :-/, but you can use the Google translation tool on the top of the page.)
All the best!
May 22, 2008 - 14:18As so often, the reasons are personal, not technical. Magnolia was switched out because a new team came into play at France24 that only had php knowledge.
As a side note, it was funny to see that the new system was only able to replace 2 out of three languages for about 6 months, during which the arabic section still ran under Magnolia. I am sure that had nothing to do with the choice of platform.
December 5, 2008 - 21:48Post new comment