A quick reminder that the first Magento Chicago Meetup is tonight. If you haven’t already, sign up to attendto meet with and learn from Magento developers and users. Join members of the Magento Team and Lyons Consulting Group as we team up for the first ever Magento Chicago Meetup. The Meetup will take place at the TechNexus and is for Chicago area Magento users, partners, developers and business owners to meet and share insights, challenges, best practices and success stories. If you’re in the Chicago area and interested in Magento, this is the place to be! Sign up now!
The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!
The Magento team continues to rapidly grow. We've recently added a number of senior positions, including:
If you love Magento (as we do), are passionate about eCommerce, and excited about the mission of “enabling the eCommerce ecosystem” worldwide, we want to hear from you! Send an email to jobs [[at]] varien.com with your resume (make sure to mention the position you are applying for).
Don't forget to keep watching our jobs page for new positions as we continue to expand globally.
The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!
Magento™ now offers AvaTax™, a fully integrated on-demand sales tax management solution for your online business. Join us for a free webinar on the advantages and benefits of this industry-leading solution, including the easiest setup, the fastest and most accurate calculations available, and complete automated back-end reporting.
Topics include:
Do you spend your valuable time dealing with sales tax when you could be growing your business? Are you constantly updating rules and trying to make sure you're in compliance with your local tax codes? If you're looking for a better solution, please join us on Tuesday, March 9th at 9am Pacific Time for an inside look at the Magento and AvaTax solution.
Date: Tuesday, March 9th, 9:00 AM PST(GMT -08:00, Los Angeles)The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!
Magento™ now offers AvaTax™, a fully integrated on-demand sales tax management solution for your online business. Join us for a free webinar on the advantages and benefits of this industry-leading solution, including the easiest setup, the fastest and most accurate calculations available, and complete automated back-end reporting.
Topics include:
Do you spend your valuable time dealing with sales tax when you could be growing your business? Are you constantly updating rules and trying to make sure you're in compliance with your local tax codes? If you're looking for a better solution, please join us on Tuesday, March 9th at 9am Pacific Time for an inside look at the Magento and AvaTax solution.
Date: Tuesday, March 9th, 9:00 AM PST(GMT -08:00, Los Angeles)The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!
I’m excited today to announce an expansion of our strategic partnership with PayPal. As the leader in the global eCommerce payments market with over 81 million active accounts, PayPal is committed to the success of open platforms and a natural partner for Magento. Over the next few months, current Magento merchants will find an expanded and deeper integration with PayPal’s products and services, including a seamless and automated merchant on boarding process. Additionally, Magento will collaborate with PayPal on a number of new product initiatives to further drive e-commerce innovation and expand the global reach of our product. More details will be released throughout the year. In the meantime, read the full press release to learn more.
The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!
This is the second in a series of blog posts about major Joomla websites and the developers who built them. First up was Jack Bremer and the U.K. arts website theArtsDesk.com.
This week we're talking with Fotis Evangelou about the major Greek sports website Gazzetta.gr.
1) Hi Fotis. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?I'm the co-founder & managing director at Komrade Ltd. I'm a Geology student dropout (!) and I've been building websites professionally for almost 10 years. I'm also the founder of JoomlaWorks, established in 2006. In late 2007, Komrade was formed and since then we're pretty fortunate to have built some of the world's top Joomla! based websites (in terms of visitor traffic) like Gazzetta.gr and TNAWrestling.com
2) What or who is Gazzetta.gr?Gazzetta.gr is a sports news website and currently one of the top websites in Greece. It was launched early 2008 and now it averages more than 5 million visitors per month. It was actually our second project as Komrade, the first being TNAWrestling.com (2m+ visitors/month). So you can also say that we got a pretty good start as Komrade! Gazzetta.gr is run by 25+ sports journalists with many years of experience in both print and online publications. It's backed financially by a major IT related company in Greece.
3) How did the project with Gazzetta.gr come about?The people behind Gazzetta.gr preferred to invest in an "open source" solution, having suffered from "closed source-itis" in the past, which cost them both time and money. Joomla! caught their eye as the best possible open source solution for Gazzetta.gr - especially because it had such a huge community. We were approached by them as we were already acknowledged professionals in the Joomla! community through JoomlaWorks. We sat down, discussed their needs and in 2 months the site was ready to launch.
4) Do you know why they made the decision to use Joomla?Strong community presence was obviously key to this decision. They would not be tied to one company only for whatever reason. Another big reason was the friendliness of the Joomla! administrator interface, which was (and still is) light years ahead compared to most open source and even commercial/closed source CMSs.
5) Question from Paulo Williams: What extensions did you use in building the site?Gazzetta.gr is now in its second version, based entirely on Joomla! 1.5 and K2. K2 is used as the main application for articles, tags, comments and more in Gazzetta.gr. It handles around 95% of all publishing/editorial related tasks.
Aside K2, we use the following publicly available extensions: Frontpage Slideshow, AllVideos, Simple Image Gallery Pro, Google Ad Manager from Joomlaworks plus JCE and Update Manager from third parties.
We also developed the following custom extensions:
To be honest, Gazzetta.gr v2 (the current version) was a joy building, with no real obstacles in the way. We had the right tool (K2) on the right platform (Joomla! 1.5.x), we had a great design and we had the (bad) experience from v1 (which used Joomla! v1.0.x). v1 was a much bigger pain to administer for various reasons. First of all, the core of com_content (the main content component of Joomla!) was significantly changed to reflect the templating needs of the design. So it made upgrading to the latest Joomla! 1.0.x release very hard. Upgrades to public extensions used was also an issue as there was no "overwrite/upgrade" feature in the Joomla! installer. So lots of manual work just for upgrading.
In v2 we wrote a simple migrator from WordPress to Joomla!/K2 (as v1 of Gazzetta.gr included around 9 WordPress based blogs in subfolders), moved Joomla! v1.0.x articles into K2, re-wrote the "news stand" component to an MVC-based Joomla! 1.5 component and then we started integrating everything to the new design. Moving the WordPress blogs to K2 in Joomla! 1.5 really made a difference to the editorial team as they now had to administer just one website (instead of 10 previously). Having all content in one database made it better/faster for Google to crawl content and for people to search the site. And best of all? The editors did not miss one bit of WordPress functionality as it's basically included in K2 features by default. So the work flow changed to better.
One thing we seriously took into consideration was making v2 as modular as possible, with no hacks at all in the core of Joomla! or any other core/third-party extension. If we wanted to extend the functionality of something in Joomla! (like the default "cache" plugin) we took that "something" and cloned it, then extended it. For that matter, we wanted "clean" solutions for everything and solution that we could re-use. We used Google's Ad Manager heavily, so we wrote an extension for Joomla! which we later publicly released through JoomlaWorks. We did the same thing for many of K2's now default modules. Our needs "translated" into modular solutions, which we were able to contribute back to the community.
In the Joomla! v1.0.x days we used to maintain a different distribution to the original build provided by joomla.org which was UTF-8 optimized. That way we could easily work with non-latin languages (like Greek) within Joomla!. Joomla! 1.5.x is now using UTF-8 by default, which was a natural step, since the CMS became so popular worldwide and had to address regional/language related issues once and for all. The use of language files also makes localization a lot easier. So developing a Greek website now is identical (as a process) to developing an English based website.
8) How do you handle 5+ million uniques per month on a Joomla site?We use two content distribution networks (CDN) as I mentioned above. They handle 99% of the load of the website and they serve content extremely fast. If we didn't use that solution, we'd have to setup and maintain a stack of servers to simulate just a portion of the performance of a CDN (note that we use 2 CDNs because we needed to break the bandwidth costs differently - one is used for articles the other for the "news stand" area). If you're into that kind of traffic, using a CDN is the only (and most cost-effective) way.
But I'll give you a great tip here... Joomla!'s built-in "cache" plugin, which is "off" by default is simply amazing. It can "convert" Joomla! web pages into static HTML pages, thus serving the website *extremely* fast. This is a hidden gem in Joomla!. For a couple of days, we run the website with our modified version of the "cache" plugin, while being hit by thousands of users and serving a few million page views. You know what? Joomla! would hold on just fine without the CDN if Apache could handle the gazillion connections and didn't run out of memory!!! It was amazing what performance can be enjoyed from just a plugin of less than 100 code lines. Of course it's the architecture of the Joomla! framework/API that permits such a little plugin to provide this performance gain! I doubt any other open source CMS can do that!
Of course it was more cost effective to continue using the CDN. Otherwise we'd have to add new hardware. And of course the imminent addition of a Gazzetta.gr iPhone app and the release of a widgets area would demand even more bandwidth...
K2 was built to address professional needs within our industry, not just the Joomla! community. It combines the best concepts from the top open source CMSs into the flexible platform that Joomla! is. Every website we build now is based off K2. Instead of keeping this "tool" of our work for us, we decided it was best to release it to the community, so other people could benefit from it. In a little less than a year, we've managed to build a great community around it (as people realize the potential of using K2) and we constantly improve the component to address new needs and improve performance.
We don't make money directly off K2, but indirectly: we can build feature rich websites for our clients in less time compared to deploying separate extensions, with better flexibility and no hacks to core files. That means an advantage for us and our clients in using the Joomla! platform. Clients can't come up to us now and say "can we do this with Drupal or WordPress?"!! Allow me to say that Joomla! and K2 is THE killer online publishing combination. Using K2, we can build a news/magazine/portal-like site with author blogs, product catalogs, work portfolio, knowledge base, download/document manager, directory listing, event listing and more the easy way! And since K2 is extensible with additional fields to its base item form, we can create category-specific content types, e.g. article, blog post, product page, directory listing. It just makes sense!
Final thing I'd like to say about K2 is that we built it because we know and appreciate the power of the Joomla! platform. But we also know its weaknesses, which lie with content presentation and ACL (access level control). With K2 we are able to fill these gaps in and, the same way people use VirtueMart for e-shops, we believe that people can use K2 for their content related needs as well.
Version 2 saw a massive increase into traffic for the website. From 3.5+ million visitors we went to 5+ millions in just 2 months and the numbers are still increasing. I guess the goal of the editorial team is to make Gazzetta.gr the top sports news website in Greece. Our constant goal is to push the limits and try new things where possible. There are many thoughts right now to extend the current content, but I'm afraid I'm not allowed to discuss in detail. What is sure is the addition of a RESTful API into K2, which will enable us to provide various services to other websites and applications at some point in the near future.
Over to You ...Do you know of a major or particularly interesting site that we should feature here? Email your suggestions to steve.burge@opensourcematters.org. Be sure to include:
Next week we'll be interviewing Dan Lopez who helped build Linux.com. If you have any questions you'd like us to ask him, email steve.burge@opensourcematters.org' ); document.write( addy_text27286 ); document.write( '<\/a>' ); //-->.
Magento Connect is growing up. It seems like only yesterday that our extension marketplace went live after a 36-hour coding marathon that left at least one of our developers completely exhausted. Magento Connect has since skyrocketed to nearly 2,000 extensions, and because the community has been an essential part of this growth, we thought it would be fitting to celebrate by launching a contest to find & announce our 2,000th extension. The three winners will be declared in the news section of our official iPhone app (we’ll also post the names here on our blog).
Ever since we first launched Magento Connect just under two years ago we’ve seen developers from around the world bring hundreds of innovative solutions to our over 40,000 merchants. Merchants have responded favorably, especially as they’ve needed to reach customers through new channels such as mobile and social media (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace), upgrade the designs of their storefronts, and integrate third-party solutions with the Magento platform to stay ahead of the curve.
Our 2,000th extension is just around the corner, and we’re launching a contest where three lucky winners will receive each the following prizes:
All three winners will receive their very own copy of the Official Magento User Guide, which has received excellent reviews and comprises 200+ pages of detailed instructions addressing the platform’s innumerable functions.
When Magento Connect first launched, our exhausted developer was wearing more on his shoulders than just the pride of developing an excellent marketplace. Each of the three winners will receive an Official Magento t-shirt, and if you’d like, you can have it signed by our CEO, Roy Rubin.
We’ve been secretly working away on a new redesign for Magento Connect, and the three lucky winners will have the chance to see it before anyone else (and even provide us with some feedback).
Instructions
First, watch the counter at the bottom of our View All Extensions page, and check the first-listed extension when the counter reaches 2,000. Note that some extensions might be updated around the same time, so you’ll need to make sure that the extension you submit is indeed a brand-new extension (hint: it won’t have any reviews or downloads).
Second, tweet the name and link of the 2,000th extension to our official Magento Connect twitter account (@magentoconnect). The first three people who tweet the correct 2,000th extension will win all three of the above prizes.
Finally, we’ll announce the names of the three winners on the news section of our official Magento iPhone app (available here). If you don’t have an iPhone, then don’t worry. Shortly after the announcement on our iPhone app we’ll also post the names of the three winners here on the Magento Blog. Be sure to check for your name and respond within 48 hours or we’ll need to award the prizes to the next person in line.
If you’d like to collaborate on this project or share updates with the community, be sure to use the #Connect2000 hashtag on twitter.
Good luck!
The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!
A European fashion e-commerce platform for KangaROOS and Flip*Flop
Magento Partner Strawberries has developed a multilingual webshop to support sales across several European markets on behalf of southern German company Bernd Hummel Holding, licence holder for the KangaROOS brand in 16 European countries. The webshop sells KangaROOS shoes, clothing and accessories.
It was not only the qualities of the KangaROOS brand that were taken into account when developing the concept for the webshops, but also the translation of this concept into other brand formulas. Besides KangaROOS, the shop concept has also been applied to the summer shoe and accessories brand Flip*Flop.
Fully integrated e-commerce platform
Bernd Hummel Holding and Strawberries bore joint responsibility for the concept while the KangaROOS and Flip*Flop shops were under development. Strawberries took care of the design, implementation and management, and the Magento platform was used as an e-commerce solution.
The webshops are fully integrated with the Austrian logistics service provider Dohmen. In addition, the e-commerce platform is integrated with a credit-check module and various social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Studivz.
About Strawberries
Strawberries is a full-service internet company based in the heart of Amsterdam. Based on a clear vision, we have been developing and translating web strategies into functional, measurable internet solutions for 12 years. Thirty employees work together with our regular partners to ensure high-quality internet applications that are in keeping with our clients’ goals and the wishes of their users.
Strawberries works for clients including V&D, adidas, SEAT, Philips, Dolcis, Manfield, ProSport, Invito, VGZ, Vereniging Eigen Huis and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!
Magento™ now offers AvaTax™, a fully integrated on-demand sales tax management solution for your online business. Join us for a free webinar on the advantages and benefits of this industry-leading solution, including the easiest setup, the fastest and most accurate calculations available, and complete automated back-end reporting.
Topics include:
Do you spend your valuable time dealing with sales tax when you could be growing your business? Are you constantly updating rules and trying to make sure you're in compliance with your local tax codes? If you're looking for a better solution, please join us on Tuesday, March 9th at 9am Pacific Time for an inside look at the Magento and AvaTax solution.
Date: Tuesday, March 9th, 9:00 AM PST(GMT -08:00, Los Angeles)The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!
Drupal 6.16 and 5.22, maintenance releases which fix issues reported through the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. Drupal 6.16 also fixes other smaller issues.
Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in the Drupal 5.0 release announcement. Drupal 5 will no longer be maintained when Drupal 7 is released. Upgrading to Drupal 6 is recommended.
Fully Integrated On-Demand Service Automates Sales Tax Management Process, Simplifies Compliance, Administration
Check out our Press Release page for this and other press releases.
Bainbridge Island, WA and Los Angeles, CA — February 25, 2010 - Avalara (www.avalara.com), the leading provider of web-based sales tax automation solutions for businesses of all sizes, and Magento, the global, Open Source, e-commerce platform, today announced their partnership aimed at enabling online merchants to easily and affordably manage sales tax calculation, compliance, and exemption certificates – previously a major challenge for online businesses. Under the terms of this agreement, Magento will offer seamless integration with Avalara’s AvaTax™ service.
Through its AvaTax service, Avalara offers the fastest, most accurate, and affordable Web-based tax compliance service available. AvaTax operates as a module, providing a fully integrated and automated sales tax management system that includes functionality to protect against audits, obsolete data, and changing tax laws. With point-and-click ease, sales tax is figured in tenths of a second, with unequaled accuracy, transaction after transaction.
“Sales tax management issues are growing exponentially for online businesses,” said Roy Rubin, CEO of Varien, the Magento company. “Our customers are devoting increasingly more time on these issues that generate no revenue and expose them to unprecedented risks. Partnering with Avalara adds a great value proposition for our customers. With 100% accuracy and a 0% increase in labor, integration with AvaTax provides significant value while decreasing overhead for Magento users.”
Magento’s integration with AvaTax is plug-and-play, simplifying the process online merchants will take to achieve sales tax compliance – without the need for major technological undertakings on their part. Magento’s clients will be able to focus on running their businesses and increasing sales, rather than attempting to keep up with constantly changing sales and use tax rates, boundaries, and taxability rules in the more than 14,000 taxing jurisdictions in North America alone.
“We look forward to working with Magento and its clients,” said Scott McFarlane, Avalara’s president and CEO. “Both Avalara and Magento have been growing in leaps and bounds in the all-important e-commerce space, and we both share the similar philosophy of providing our mutual clients with innovative solutions which reduce administrative burdens and help them work more efficiently,” concluded McFarlane.
About Avalara
Based in Bainbridge Island, WA, Avalara is transforming the sales and use tax compliance process for businesses of all sizes. With point-and-click ease, Avalara provides the fastest, easiest, most accurate, and affordable way for companies to address their statutory tax requirements. Chosen by nearly 10,000 businesses throughout the U.S., Canada, and abroad, and a trusted provider of over 200 million sales tax calculations annually, Avalara is the recognized leader in web-based sales tax services and solutions. For more information, please visit www.avalara.com or contact .
About Magento
Magento is a feature-rich, professional Open Source eCommerce platform solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the presentation, content, and functionality of their online channel. Magento’s intuitive administration interface features powerful marketing tools, a catalog-management engine and is SEO optimized to give merchants the power to create sites that provide an unrivaled and rich online shopping experience for their customers, tailored to their unique business needs. Designed to be completely scalable and backed by an extensive support network, Magento is the ultimate eCommerce solution. For more information about Magento, please visit www.MagentoCommerce.com or contact .
Custom Magento System Configuration by Alan Storm http://is.gd/9pGqa
NOW AVAILABLEThe Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!
Do you spend your valuable time dealing with sales tax when you could be growing your business? Are you constantly updating rules and trying to make sure you’re in compliance with your local tax codes? Magento is proud to announce that we’ve teamed up with Avalara (www.avalara.com), the leading provider of web-based sales tax automation solutions for businesses of all sizes, to enable Magento merchants to easily and affordably manage sales tax calculation, compliance, and exemption certificates. As of today, Magento will offer seamless integration with Avalara’s AvaTax™ service.
Through its AvaTax service, Avalara offers the fastest, most accurate, and affordable Web-based tax compliance service available. AvaTax operates as a module, providing a fully integrated and automated sales tax management system that includes functionality to protect against audits, obsolete data, and changing tax laws. With point-and-click ease, sales tax is figured in tenths of a second, with unequaled accuracy, transaction after transaction.
Check out our Press Release page to read the full press releases and get more details.
The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!
This is the first in a series of blog posts about major Joomla websites and the developers who built them. First up is Jack Bremer and the major U.K. arts website theArtsDesk.com.
Drupal 6 Attachment Views, by me, J. Ayen Green, is my second title from Packt Publishing. It is aimed at Drupal web site developers who want to build more functionality and interaction into their views, but aren’t ready quite yet to take on panels. As a reader of drupal.org, you can receive a 15% discount (see below) and benefit the Drupal Association!
I wrote this to be a fun, informative, hands-on learning guide. It uses actual case study that was developed in parallel with the book’s writing. This guide presents purposeful and interactive examples that build on each other. Clear, concise instructions and practical examples help you to learn quickly to use this exciting feature of views.
Will you be attending this week’s 2010 Retail Innovation and Marketing Conference in San Francisco? Join us as Magento, along with Enterprise Partners Optaros co-sponsor the National Retail Foundation’s 2010 Retail Innovation and Marketing Conference on March 2-4 in San Francisco, CA. Founder Roy Rubin and other members of the Magento team will be on hand throughout the opening reception and show. If you are interested in meeting with any members of the Magento team please contact our Vice President of Sales, to schedule a time to talk.
The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!
Last Novemberr the Joomla! Community in Italy put on an incredible Joomla! Day. Over 500 people attended and another 7000 watched on the live stream. I watched some of it live, and (even though I don't speak Italian) it was amazing. Not only that, they ran it as a free event and still made enough money to contribute 750 Euros to the Joomla! Project.
Over 400 session submissions have been submitted for DrupalCon San Francisco, which will be held April 19-21, 2010. We need your help in deciding which of those sessions will be included in the conference program. Please come review the list of sessions and vote on the ones you'd like to see most.
Voting ends Monday, March 1st at 23:59 PST.
DrupalCon is a community-driven event. You've shared with us a vast array of exciting new ideas, proven recipes for success, case studies, best practices, new solutions to old problems, and other gems of knowledge. Now help us narrow down the selection. Your opinions are what shapes what happens at DrupalCon. Remember, every vote counts!
If you're a business, organization, or individual interested in helping to sponsor DrupalCon San Francisco, opportunities are still available. Contact us via the Web site, via e-mail at fundraising@drupal.com or phone at 415-894-9320 today!
The 2010 edition of the Google Summer of Code has been announced, and we are setting the groundwork to submit our application to participate again this year. Joomla! has participated 5 times in the Google Summer of Code and has benefited greatly by the continued support that Google offers to the FOSS world through this program. One of the best benefits for Joomla! has been the retention of students as contributors to the project long after the program ends. A lot of great work has been accomplished that has not only been of benefit for the core code base, but also extensions that have been produced and the innovation the Google Summer of Code work has inspired, every single year we have participated. Joomla! at this time is one of the most successful open source projects in its class with downloads now exceeding 15 million, and the Google Summer of Code has been integral to that success. An in-depth look at all of our past participation shows how important this program is for both Joomla! and the students that participate:
Back in April of last year, Matt posted here on the dev blog about the release of BuddyPress 1.0, a plugin that adds a social networking layer to an installation of WordPress MU. Many people were excited about the idea, but were unable to experiment with BuddyPress because they ran single installations of WordPress rather than the multi-site WordPress MU. To those people, good news! A little over a week ago Andy Peatling, founder and lead developer of BuddyPress, announced the release of BuddyPress 1.2, which can be used on single installations of WordPress. Congratulations, BuddyPress! And congratulations to all the people who’ve been waiting with bated breath for this to happen.
The first thing I thought when I heard the news was, “Awesome! Now everyone can put BuddyPress on their site if they want it.” The second thought I had was, “Shoot! Average WordPress users won’t want to try BuddyPress if they have to switch their site themes over to the BuddyPress default theme just to try it out.” The third thought I had was, “That can’t be right. I’ll ask Andy.”
As it turned out, you could keep your current theme with BuddyPress if you added a couple of files and made a few file edits. There was even a link on the BuddyPress site to download the necessary files. That still seemed a little clunky, though, so Andy, super awesome guy that he is, went ahead and made a plugin to get you started. The BuddyPress Template Pack can be installed directly from your WordPress admin (Plugins > Add New), and will walk you through the theme additions step by step.*
Now you can use BuddyPress with your single site installation of WordPress, and you can keep your existing theme. Seriously, could BuddyPress have made it any easier for you to add social networking to your site? I know I can’t wait to try it out this weekend, how about you?
* Don’t forget to install BuddyPress itself, or the template pack plugin won’t do anything!
The Augusta Chronicle, the flagship newspaper of Morris Publishing Group, recently relaunched its website on the outstanding Drupal framework.
Morris first began using Drupal in 2005 with the launch of BlufftonToday.com, a blog-centric community website coupled with a free daily newspaper. In 2006 it adopted Drupal for both news and blogs at SavannahNow.com, the website of the Savannah Morning News. Both newspapers won Digital Edge awards for innovation in user participation.
Since then, the digital media arm of Morris Communications, Morris DigitalWorks, has developed a robust digital newspaper platform built on Drupal 6, to eventually power all 13 of its daily newspapers. Morris also uses Drupal for its radio stations and Skirt.com, a national specialty site for women.
Reader ParticipationMorris has made a commitment to make their online platform a dynamic arena for reader participation and contributions. Readers are encouraged to comment on stories and blogs, and, on some papers, are encouraged to create their own blogs on the site. Journalists are expected to post news online immediately and to interact with the public, and they need to be able to do it without learning HTML or tools such as FTP. These requirements made Drupal a natural choice.