Drupal 6 is an even better CMS option

Posted on February 14, 2008 by pat

Drupal 6 officially launched yesterday, bringing new features, better security and faster performance, while being easier to use.

This is great news for news organizations looking for a cheap and flexible CMS option, especially college newspapers. If a college newspaper has the right staff in place (Web developers in particular) Drupal is a very strong choice for a CMS. It is very flexible, and it is constantly being improved.

Plus, the price — free — is right for low-budget collegiate publications. Another reason I really like Drupal is that it is highly customizable and extensible through the use of modules. This is great for learning environments because it allows developers to experiment.

Most papers only need a new CMS every few years or so, and that can pose a problem with finding good development talent. Developers like to actually develop, instead of being administrators. By using a customizable CMS like Drupal, you’ll keep your developers happy.

Typically, however, student developers aren’t allowed to touch the CMSes that college newspapers use. This can lead to developers becoming bored. And frankly many people complain that their CMS can’t do this or that, but if you have a CMS that is highly customizable, you have no one to blame but your own staffers.

I also like Drupal because it’s a great platform for continual R&D. Need to roll out new features? Drupal makes it much easier to do this than a proprietary CMS would.

College newspapers should really try to mimic professional newsrooms (the good ones at least). This means college newspaper need to make sure they have front-end and back-end Web Developers.

Drupal has a gotten a lot more powerful and easy to use since the dark ages. It’s a great CMS option for many organizations.

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  • http://patrickbeeson.com Patrick Beeson

    I believe mentioning that Drupal is “free” is a bit of a misstatement.

    Sure, Drupal is free to use, but it will cost quite a bit in terms of designer/developer hours to configure for the needs of a particular business (newspaper, etc).

  • http://www.patthorntonfiles.com pat

    Patrick,

    I agree that Drupal does require some serious front end and back end development work. However, college newspapers should have developers on staff. A modern news organization needs programmers, and what college programmer would relish the opportunity to delve into some serious Drupal experimentation?

    Think about all those computer science and Web students at the typical college and university. They’d love to get to work on a project that gave them some autonomy. Most computer science projects are kind of boring, but the ability to set up and develop a major Web site is a fun and rewarding task. Most college students never get that great experience they can show potential employers.

    Working on a college newspaper is a great opportunity for more than just would-be journalists. It’s also a great opportunity for would-be programmers and graphic designers. I find that too many college newspapers only reach out to the journalism program when looking for staffers. College newspapers should be reaching out to design programs, computer science and engineering programs and all the disciplines that could have help make college newspapers better.

    A modern news organization needs a lot more that just journalists. And as much as many students want to learn some programming or design, usually the best talent in those areas is not found within journalism programs.

    College newspapers need to think of themselves as great laboratories of experimentation. Too many collegiate newspapers take themselves too seriously and aren’t willing to take big risks (and deal with failure.

    In short, every college newspaper should have people on board that can work with Drupal.

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