See the VPA's stances on 
New Media
Smaller Papers Can Benefit from Content Management Systems
By Scott Bateman
VPA Online Media Consultant
Launching a new version of VPA.net on a content management system has provided valuable lessons for newspaper sites, especially weekly and small daily sites.
Newspaper sites should be built on a CMS for several important reasons. A CMS will save staff time from coding pages, provide rich functionality such as search, display consistent templates that don’t confuse site visitors and make it much easier to implement changes that affect numerous pages.
We built our new site on a content management system (CMS) called ExpressionEngine. The cost for a commercial license is $250.
Three types of CMS platforms are available: commercial, open source and customized. Commercial systems such as EE have fees ranging greatly depending on the size of the site, functional requirements, amount of technical support and other factors. Free, open-source CMS platforms including Drupal, Joomla and Zope come with no support other than community message boards. A custom system usually is built upon parts of other platforms, most often open source.
I have had the opportunity to work with all three types. Here are some primary considerations in making a choice:
1. Price: balancing limited budgets with capabilities that grow audience and revenue
2. Technical support: staff versus outsourced
3. Training and documentation: strongest with commercial, weakest with open source
4. Usability: Is it intuitive or easy to use for staff with limited technical skills?
5. Productivity: Make sure the time savings in the long run exceed the effort needed to launch.
It is critically important to keep in mind that different content systems have different strengths and weaknesses.
On the positive side, ExpressionEngine is inexpensive, provides some obligatory technical support through message boards and has a rich set of site features that are especially good for small news sites and associations, including flexible templates, easy publishing, email newsletters and robust search. It requires little maintenance effort once the site is built.
On the negative side, EE takes a great deal of upfront labor because of the numerous templates that have to be built if the site design requires flexible templates. It has a unique tagging system on top of the standard HTML that is not very intuitive.
In our case, the positives outweighed the negatives.
In contrast, an open-source system such as Joomla or Drupal is free, is easy to set up and launch, and has numerous add-ons created by other developers. But the negatives include weak documentation, security issues and no support other than community message boards. If something goes wrong, you are painfully on your own.
Finally, a customized system has the greatest potential for giving you what you want exactly the way you want it. But it has great upfront labor costs, and if the prime architect of the system leaves, you are left with the difficult task of finding and training the replacement.
Scott Bateman is the new media consultant for the Virginia Press Association. He can be reached at or (804) 521-7577.
(0) Comments •