Tag Archives: content management systems

Today’s two WordPress.com VIP launches: PandoDaily and Grist

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Today, MLK day even, two new sites launched on WordPress.com VIP that I’m personally pretty excited about.

PandoDaily

PandoDaily is a brand new tech site started by Sarah Lacy, former senior editor at TechCrunch. From her announcement post:

We have one goal here at PandoDaily: To be the site-of-record for that startup root-system and everything that springs up from it, cycle-after-cycle. That sounds simple but it’ll be incredibly hard to pull off. It’s not something we accomplish on day one or even day 300. It’s something we accomplish by waking up every single day and writing the best stuff we can, and continually adding like-minded staffers who have the passion, drive and talent to do the same.

So… this sounds like a newer, better, and fresher TechCrunch starting from scratch. And she’s recruited Michael Arrington, MG Siegler, Paul Carr and Farhad Manjoo as regular contributors. Props to Sara Cannon for pulling off the design.

Grist

Grist, a non-profit environmental news publication, is near and dear to my heart. It’s why I’m on the technology side of publishing instead of photographing in the third world. In summer 2007, I worked an awesome web production internship where, in exchange for a bit of copy and pasting into the CMS, I had the freedom to explore publishing on the web and to start developing my skills. That was back in the days of Bricolage; Grist has since been on ExpressionEngine. Props to Matt Perry and Nathan Letsinger for making the switch happen (and to the Otto and Nacin show for their support).

Want to help publishers kick ass with WordPress? Come join my team — we’re hiring.

The Bifurcation of Content Management and Delivery

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I believe that, at some point, a vendor will decouple their delivery tier from their management tier and spin it off as a separate product that works with other vendor’s management systems.

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EPiServer CMS v6 R2 has one of the best features I’ve seen in a CMS in its Visitor Groups. This feature lets you develop criteria to profile demographic groups – you can put all people who come from monster.com, for instance, into a “Potential Job Seeker” group and then morph your site for them – highlight a different featured link, for instance, or even show different content down to the paragraph (even sentence) level.

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So, it’s got me thinking – how long before someone abstracts this feature? It happens to be part of EPiServer now, but it could really be done with any CMS… or without one. How long before someone develops some CMS-agnostic system that runs in the delivery tier that provides this functionality? They’ll sell some connectors, of course, that make it work gracefully with the popular CMS, but it would stand on its own.

The Bifurcation of Content Management and Delivery. I almost wonder if content management is going the way of the bison, in favor of loosely-coupled content production, storage and presentation. Elegant tools for content creation are certainly becoming the rage; evolution with the presentation layer is a ripe fruit waiting to be picked. (via Max a long time ago I think)