Financial necessity led to the editorial team of Discover magazine to opt for an open source solution for their new content management system. And this article by Henry Donahue confirms that they are pretty happy with the results. A lesson for government web people.
Copyblogger theme design by Chris Pearson | Hosted by ENTANET
3 comments ↓
There’s lots to be said for open source CMS systems for government.
One of the lessons of our age is that active open source communities simply innovate faster, as well as building, on the whole, better software.
One example that caught my attention was news that the guys at leading open source CMS, Drupal (http://drupal.org/), are busily adding support for RDFa into the core for version 7.
See: http://buytaert.net/drupal-the-semantic-web-and-search and in particular: http://groups.drupal.org/node/16597.
That’s my idea of a powerful combination – a high quality open source CMS plus smart technology for unlocking data!
Can we even call it a dilemma any more?
The Federal Government of Australia site is running on MySource Matrix, as are some NHS sites: http://matrix.squiz.net/
And here Simon Dickson reports a DCSF site on Drupal: http://puffbox.com/2008/12/01/dcsfs-new-drupal-site/
And of course, No 10 on WordPress. But that’s a smaller, newsier site than most government organisations.
I’d love to see more government sites go in this direction. The simple facts are that big IT projects don’t deliver value for money, and website development can never be declared ‘finished’.
We should be giving serious thought to the OSS marketplace, developing iteratively and incrementally – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterative_and_incremental_development.
…but probably with commercial support contracts on top.
[...] The Content Management Dilemma – Tom Watson highlights an interesting open source CMS case study. [...]
Leave a Comment