Addressing Problems in Changing a CMS Environment at the Motley Fool
(Masters Series) The Motley Fool's content management system (CMS) and processes and web sites are homegrown. The company is now executing a series of projects to clean up a number of design and process issues, and the Master's Series panel will examine and analyse the work so far.
- Date:
- Wednesday 6 December 2006, 3:30 pm
- Track:
- Documents and Publishing
- Primary Presenter:
- Mark Kennedy, Senior Developer, The Motley Fool (http://www.fool.com/)
- Co-Presenter:
- Andrew Savikas, Director, Digital Content & Publishing Services, O'Reilly Media, Inc.
- Co-Presenter:
- Ed Stevenson, Director of Content Strategies, Really Strategies Inc. (http://www.reallysi.com)
- Co-Presenter:
- B. Tommie Usdin, President, Mulberry Technologies, Inc. (http://www.mulberrytech.com)
- Co-Presenter:
- Mark Walter, Director, Business Development, Managing Editor, Inc. (http://www.maned.com/)
- Proceedings:
- slides (pdf)
Abstract
The Motley Fool (_http://www.fool.com_) publishes information on investment and other financial matters for consumers. The site is one of the top 500 most-visited Internet sites. While it began as a mostly online newsletter service, the Motley Fool now publishes content to many different print and online channels. As a result, the Motley Fool faces many of the same content, workflow, and technology challenges as more traditional publishers.
The Motley Fool’s content management system (CMS) and processes and web sites are homegrown. The company is now executing a series of projects to clean up a number of design and process issues.
In a major first step, the Fool is better separating its content from its web sites. Earlier this year, the Fool launched the first online newsletter using its new development environment (.Net). This provided the chance to rethink how the content is delivered to the sites. In the past, the CMS merged content, presentation information, and programming logic together into a single file and handed that off to the web site. This limited site flexibility and meant that the CMS had to "know" a lot of site-specific information. For the new site, the CMS delivers clean XML instead, and XSLT in the site is used to render the documents at request time. The result is that code maintenance is easier and centralized in the site itself, and site presentation can be tweaked as needed without content changes. The Fool is now in the process of moving all its premium sites (including Fool.com) to this model, with the goal of completing this project in November.
Now that the CMS is more cleanly separated from the web sites, the Motley Fool is ready to look more seriously at the CMS itself - how should it change and how should the workflows change? What is the right print/online workflow solution given the classic publishing issues faced (the Fool often publishes online-only content, but much of the content needs to be copy fitted to fit into an InDesign print layout)?
