Need advice picking a platform for a news website

Zascar

Hey guys, a friend of mine is launching a startup overseas and has come to me for advice. In essence it’s a news website – it has a specific niche but in reality it’s news & content based and he hopes to form a community and then has loads of ways of monetising it. I think he needs essentially a proper publishing platform that can not only do the front end website etc but all the back end stuff also. Contributors, approvals etc. He will have some employees but a lot of the content will come from contributors, other sources, outsourcing etc. Wants a social or community aspect to it also. Wordpress won’t cut it I’m assuming this will be some sort of well known and well developed platform. He wants it to be constantly improved, developed and changed to adapt to how the business will grow and what will work. He may employ someone or just get the company themselves to do the development.

I only know a little bit about web design but I’m assuming I can probably quickly narrow this town to a small bunch of companies who’s focus is on exactly that and already have a load of high profile client references. I’m hoping you guys might be able to point me in the right direction with some names or how I can come up with a shortlist of applicable platforms?

Thanks

SeanPuddin

Drupal was pretty much written for the reasons you outline above. There's quite a learning curve though.

https://drupal.org/

johnmcdnl

Out of interest why don't you think Wordpress cut it??

Techcrunch
Reuters

and a whole load more
http://en.wordpress.com/notable-users/

If it's suitable for these large news sites why doesn't it suit you needs. From a quick scan of your requirements listed Wordpress can do most of them of the top of my head.

Drupal and Joomla are two other big CMS systems that you could look into as well.

SeanPuddin

There's also Joomla

I think you'll need to do a deep dive investigation into which is best for your needs.

Avantech

Hi Zascar,

I would certainly be going with something like Joomla or Drupal, they should give you much more scope to compete what you need to do. A lot of companies develop in them, there is a large community for support and some really nice themes for purchase.

draiochtanois

This post has been deleted.

Zascar

Thanks guys. I know wordpress and use it myself its fantastic, but really its a blogging platform and I'm told he is going to want much more than that - probably wants cms capabilities etc. I totally realise there are huge sites using wordpress, but mainly just for the blog portion of their site. Or am I wrong?

I agree yes Joomla & Drupal sound like good bets. Draiochtanois Why do you say it has performance issues?

How do I go about picking the right person/company to build this?

Avantech

Hi Zascar,

I don't think you will have too many performance issues. really it all will depend on the type of content, what type of traffic you are expecting and what kind of budget you have. The server setup and configuration if done correctly can speed up many websites, poor hosting config will cause the site to behave poorly.

There are loads of companies out there that could do this for you, my company is one of them, but in order to even estimate how long and pricing etc. there would have to be a large discussion around things. It is difficult, do you pick a large company who have loads of staff that can do this for you although you may not be dealing directly with the developer or do you pick a smaller company who have minimal staff and can be involved with you the whole way through the development process.

Zascar

Ok great thanks. So my friend does not live in Ireland so I doubt it will be done from here (Sorry otherwise I'd happily introduce you) - so exactly as you say, I need to advise him whether to go the big agency route - or the small company and better service etc.

Avantech

That's no problem at all!

But if you do have difficulty in getting someone who can help you out you can always come back and find me. We do work like this globally with some of our main customers in the States.

Best of luck with it!

colm_c

Worth talking to woop.ie

They're doing some really nice work in the digital publishing arena.

Talisman

If you don't want to be tied to PHP you should take a look at Hippo as a CMS solution, it's written in Java. Out of of the box gives you features that eat up development time on projects: 3 minute Tour of Hippo CMS

rovoagho

Without meaning to be rude, you're wrong about WordPress. For a start, a blogging platform is ideal for news, since blogging and news are essentially the same thing, a date-based stream of posts. However WordPress is far from just that at this stage, mostly due to the excellent plugin API.

As a relevant example, I manage all of Landmark's local newspaper websites in a single WordPress Multisite install, on a single dedicated server. Bog standard CentOS LAMP stack with a wee bit of tuning, Varnish and CloudFlare. Their news comes both from their central newsroom via FeedWordPress, and local journalists and editors.

It's an excellent, cheap, and easy to use platform for news.

Zascar

Ok fair enough - as I said I love wordpress but from what my friend tells me, this is much more than just a standard blog / news website so I (perhaps wrongly) assumed he'd need something more dedicated towards being a cms / publishing platform. It's been a few years since I've used Wordpress for anything more than a standard blog.

So why would anyone use Drupal or Joomla instead of wordpress? Or what about using any more enterprise class publishing or content management solution?

stevenmu

If you/he are going to engage with developers to build the site for you, then I would suggest forgetting about selecting the platform to start with. Starting out by selecting a platform is just hamstringing yourself for later on.

For e.g. there might be a developer out there who would create the perfect solution for you but they mostly work with Wordpress, if you decide now to go with Drupal you will never even get to see what they would suggest.

Instead, at this point you/he should really be focusing on getting the requirements drawn up and refined. Once you have that you/he can approach different developers and let them propose solutions using the platforms they think will work best. The you/he can select the best overall solution.

Zascar

Yep - I think you are absolutely right. What I have learnt from this thread is that there are many options and the obvious free and open source ones can do just as good a job - I thought maybe he needed some potentially expensive enterprise solution. But good to know he can stick with the old reliables.

Thanks for your help guys. I'll get him to write up a list of requirements and go from there. Any other tips or comments appreciated.

tricky D

Zascar wrote: »

Ok fair enough - as I said I love wordpress but from what my friend tells me, this is much more than just a standard blog / news website so I (perhaps wrongly) assumed he'd need something more dedicated towards being a cms / publishing platform. It's been a few years since I've used Wordpress for anything more than a standard blog.

WP with all that has been developed around it, has uses way beyond a standard blog these days, right up into enterprise levels. The notion of it being just for standard blogging is well out-of-date.

jmcc

Work out some specifications first. You need some idea of the numbers of users, the numbers of visitors first. Otherwise you are just going to get the random Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal suggestions which might fold under the strain of the first big story or article.

Regards...jmcc