Publishing
WoodWing and Acquia: moving from print to the web
A couple of days ago, Acquia announced a technology partnership with WoodWing. WoodWing's Enterprise 6 Content Publishing Platform now ships with Acquia Drupal as the default CMS, as well as a connector module. WoodWing's typical customers are traditional publishers with strong roots in print -- and with names like Time Inc, Cisco, Michelin, Citibank and many more, they have an impressive list of customers at that.
For most publishers, print continues to decline, and the web continues to grow. It is no surprise that their online strategy has become increasingly important for them. Many are in the process of optimizing their tools, processes and people for the web, rather than for print. It is a very disruptive change if you're a 100-year old organization that is optimized for print.
As publishers get settled on the web, they learn that it is not about broadcasting a message. On the web, it is about having a dialogue with your readers. As a publisher, you have to figure out how to turn audiences into participants because it opens the doors for better advertising and new monetization opportunities. Clearly, it doesn't suffice to copy-paste the content that you prepared for print into your web content management system.
As the web continues to evolve, readers will have a much richer experience online, and as a result, I believe print media will end up being a lead generation tool for the website, not the other way around as it often is today. Drupal's combination of content management and social software capabilities helps publishers to stay on top of this trend, and provides their writers and journalists the tools needed to be successful on the web.
But just like WoodWing's customers can benefit from Drupal, I think Drupal can learn a lot from WoodWing, and the issues that their customers have to deal with. As I write this blog post, I'm in Greece attending the WoodWing Publisher Conference, not only to educate WoodWing partners and customers about Drupal, but also to learn more about WoodWing's technology and challenges their customers are faced with. Like Drupal, WoodWing has a great community sharing both expertise and ideas. I really believe this partnership is a great match on many different levels.
InfoWorld using Drupal
InfoWorld relaunched on Drupal 6 yesterday! Check out their new site at http://infoworld.com. InfoWorld has been around since 1978 and is a well-known resource for IT professionals. I hope they write up a use case because it is a great testament to Drupal 6.
The project was done by Optaros (an Acquia partner), with help from Airbag Industries for the design work. Chris Fuller was the project lead.
Mother Jones using Drupal
The new Mother Jones launched on Drupal. Wikipedia describes Mother Jones as an independent, non-profit magazine rooted in progressive political values and known for its investigative reporting. It has a paid circulation of 233,000 and it the most widely read progressive publication in the United States. The new site was built by EchoDitto, a Drupal shop in Washington DC. Additional details can be found in the Mother Jones announcement.
Slate.fr using Drupal
While in France for the Drupal.org redesign code sprint in Paris, it was pointed out by a number of people that Slate.fr, the French version of the popular culture magazine Slate, is using Drupal. Slate is owned by the The Washington Post Company.
P-Magazine using Drupal
Belgian men's magazine P-Magazine (LSFW) recently switched to Drupal. I don't know who built the site, but I'm told it is hosted on a multi-server cluster at Combell. More proof that Drupal is growing strong in Belgium. Cool!
Spotlight Verlag using Drupal
Spotlight Verlag, a well-known German publisher, recently launched another Drupal site: http://www.business-spotlight.de.
Udo Gerhards, Project Manager Online at Spotlight Verlag, explained to me that the site is targeted at language learners and that they built a number of complex interactive language tests; see here for a JavaScript based drag and drop test, and see here for a regular multi-page HTML form test. Development of the site was done mainly by their in-house development team, with some help from Auvica.
When asked, Udo told me that CCK, Views and Panels were the main reasons for using Drupal. Their biggest pain point was in staging their development environment to reliably push big changes to their production environment.
They use a multi-site install with a single master user database (every login in the different Drupal instances is checked against one central user database, so users share the same login data for different websites in their network). This master database is also connected to their magazine subscriber database. The multi-site setup makes it easier for them to roll out and maintain the additional Drupal sites that they have in the pipeline.
Industry Standard using Drupal
The Industry Standard, aka thestandard.com, is using Drupal. The Industry Standard features news and analysis that covers emerging technologies and companies, venture funding, acquisitions, site launches, and other developments in the internet space. This system is built as a prediction market, intersected with a reputation-based social network. The site is part of the IDG network, which includes sites like Computerworld, Infoworld, JavaWorld.com, Macworld, PC World, and more.
Like most big Drupal sites, they use CCK, Views, memcache, and a master-slave database configuration. Two noteworthy items are the fact that they use Apache Solr for search, and Mollom as their spam deterrent.
