Today, I’m down at Google in Mountain View at Techraking, a gathering of technologists and investigative journalists. It’s been super inspiring because of the fresh to me perspectives — I’d love to help Portland media outlets with projects like those I’ve heard about.
At lunch, I learnt I was to lead a small group breakout on “the future of the CMS.” To keep the discussion going, we started out by brainstorming the things we liked and want to improve our respective software, and then did a roundtable to identify our six month personal goals.
Some things people like about their CMS:
- Drupal done well is easy to use; there are a ton of modules
- Affordability, open source is cheap
- Community to work with
- Many different homepage templates to choose from depending on the stories of the day
What people would like to improve (lots of conversation, as expected):
- Data portability
- More headless; produce output other than HTML
- Scalability, faster when many people are working in the admin
- Less steps for completing common, simple tasks
- Integration with story budgeting, calendaring; API for story flow
- Magical WYSIWYG editor; auto-save that works; track changes
- Support structured data / semantic markup
- Customization for story layout
- Small pieces loosely joined; better integration with other services
Given the short notice, I thought the breakout session went quite well. About twenty people showed up. In terms of what worked:
- Small group discussion; knew enough backgrounds to call out different people to talk
- Noted salient points on the whiteboard as a way of plotting direction
- I enjoyed the “what are you going to work on in the next six months” takeaways at the end
Next time, we should:
- Figure out the location ahead of time so we don’t waste time finding it
- Have people introduce themselves if they haven’t spoken yet
- Every fifteen minutes, have something for everyone to participate in so people don’t check out
