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Good Software for Editorial Management?
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?"
If you have 10K to drop, try out Ellington ( http://www.ellingtoncms.com/ ).
Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise for the rest of us.
"A few permanents writers", nice editing slick. :)
-- Eric
Well, if you can do some SQL and basic OO programming...I recommend looking into the database packages over at http://pear.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!
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
Nary an error slips by it...
Cmdr. Taco, we know it's you.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Bricolage has a lot of what you're looking for, and it's very well built.
Here is a good intro to what it is and how it works.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
You're the editor of a Brazilian news sites? Just how many is that, anyway?
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 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".
"With 10K you can pay a group of developers to do something really good, right?"
I'm certain Brazilians work cheap.
This doesn't cover all the CMS you might want to investigate (nothing costing $10K, for instance, in case that really is something you want), but http://opensourcecms.com/ has dozens of systems installed for demo use, so you might be able to get a sense of whether one of them would be appropriate. I have found that the demo versions don't have all the modules, so it wouldn't surprise me if you can't actually "test drive" any project management modules for the systems. For general demo, though, it's pretty cool.
One of the volunteers on that site also runs http://ongetc.com/, which has summary information on a few more CMS possibilities. The first site is restricted to open source tools that use PHP/MySQL. The second site seems less restrictive. I'm still looking for more general sources.
As you already use the Drupal CMS you probably don't want to switch to another CMS. However if you do, you may want to take a look at these other options:
* http://www.mmbase.org/
* http://typo3.com/
Both are open source packages, and both are very feature rich. I also believe both offer some form of work flow management.
I'm not sure because during my evaluation I noticed both packages had too many features for my use. I ended up using Drupal.
I hear iWebpress has extensive features for managing assignments, deadlines, etc. http://www.iwebpress.com/
Why not fork?
Shut th fuck up. What do you know? May be I like having my ass raped by filthy spammers. MAybe I even enjoy it.
It sounds to me that he rather needs a CMS for managing online content, not really a project co-ordination system. Therefore, Zope/Plone as front-end to the already existing (?) MySQL-database should be fine: comes with a lot of managing tools, workflow template etc. and allows easy customization. And it's free. And: there is a strong, large, and friendly community helping to fix any problem very fast. For the 10k (US-$?) he could get a lot of additional work done if needed. Ah, yes: And one of the main Plone developers is from Brazil :-)
http://www.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.
do {print "Mini-Geek Rules!\n";}
until ($TheEndOfTheWorld);
Some sort of Zope-based solution is probably what you're looking for. Someone else already mentioned Plone, but there are other options on top of Zope in addition to Plone. Besides canned things like Nuxeo CPS and Silva, the built-in CMF for Zope can be pretty readily customized, and sites ranging from the huge to the moderate use custom-built Zope solutions to manage contributions from multiple sources.
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 tweaking. Obviously you want some editorial control over your site, so the democratic decisions to post or not post an article are probably inadaquate for your group.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
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...
Don't you want to be like Rob and Cmdr Taco?
Nothign beats xaraya in terms of flexibility and customization. There is a workflow module in it.
Might want to have a look at CoFAX. It a Java CMS designed specifically for newspapers, and unlike Ellington, doesn't cost you a kidney.