Scripps papers now (almost) all Ellington, all the time
This is a milestone day. As of 1:30 a.m. Eastern time this morning, Scripps Newspapers Interactive Group and our many local sites completed the main phase of their 18-month content management system rollout.
All of these newspaper sites and affiliated niche products now run in Scripps' version of Ellington, the content system built atop the Django framework and Python programming language. In no particular order:
- Albuquerque Tribune
- Boulder Daily Camera
- San Angelo Standard-Times
- Redding Record-Searchlight
- Rocky Mountain News
- Evansville Courier Press (Our first conversion, June 2006.)
- Knoxville News Sentinel
- Memphis Commercial Appeal
- Abilene Reporter-News
- Wichita Falls Times Record News
- Naples Daily News (Our latest conversion, just this morning. Naples had already been in a version of Ellington, but the overnight move put the Florida sites in the Scripps-managed version.)
- Scripps Treasure Coast newspapers
- Corpus Christi Caller-Times
- Ventura County Star
- Kitsap Sun
- Blount Today
- Anderson Independent-Mail
The project included much more than a systems conversion, though that alone represents a very heavy and difficult workload. All these sites took on new designs and new features, such as a video player/playlist platform, in the process.
Mind you, we still have some local niche sites and other projects to move into the new CMS in the coming year. But this list includes every site we set out to move in the main project, and a couple that we added along the way.
It took a cast of hundreds, on site in local markets and within the corporate team, to get this done. The teams' work, as manifested in these sites, speaks for itself. Mine was a bit part, and that allows me to be extremely proud of the fine creative and development work of the whole organization. Thanks, gang!
Installation method
Are these all individual installations of Ellington or is there a central system that controls each site? Just wondering how the whole thing is set up. I imagine it was a herculean effort!
Mostly separate
Each local newspaper team has its own installation of the Ellington application stack. In some cases, smaller sites share the same cluster of Web, database and media servers, but each newspaper.com is logically its own software.
As you might imagine, almost every local newspaper has one or more niche content products that site leaders hope to run under separate domains, but using one administrative back-end. So it's high on our development list to find easier ways to set up those niche products without having to tweak out new installations every time.
Congrats!
Another early morning rollout, eh? :) Those are some really great looking sites. Great job to all involved. Ellington looks like it's the perfect product for this industry.
As far as the separate domains are concerned... You could probably just set up a subdomain and have it proxy requests through to a specific directory under the main Ellington install so you'd retain a single admin backend. I'd do that kind of magic using Apache's mod_proxy, but you could also set it up on your load balancers.
Although personally, I think the something.newspaper.com is a tired concept and a usability annoyance -- one typo, and the user gets nowhere. The trusty newspaper.com/greatsection is my preference, as you can do some magic to correct typos and get the user to the content.
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