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Another big Scripps step
We've done some redesigns, but hoo boy! This is a big deal for us. Scripps' newspapers interactive group and the Evansville (Ind.) Courier & Press today launched an all-new courierpress.com.
First, read the on-site announcement and the growing list of user comments below it. Then, let me tell you a little about this project from behind the scenes:
- It is the first newspaper.com our group has rebuilt using the Ellington content management system atop the Django development framework. (That doesn't mean it's the first Scripps paper to use Ellington and Django. That would be the Naples Daily News, where Rob Curley and his team brought in the CMS having experience with it from their days in Lawrence, Kansas.)
- Evansville is our group's first Ellington rebuild, but not our last. More than a dozen sites remain, and we're gunning to have them done before this time next year.
- The site takes full advantage of the built-in user-friendly tools of Ellington, including story comments, event calendars, links by popularity, iPod-friendly article displays and more.
- Ellington's user registration scheme did not include a content-access threshold method such as the one we recently implemented, so our developers set that up anew.
- Based on experience and user feedback, Scripps designers just keep improving the visuals, HTML and CSS architectures we first rolled out 14 months ago for knoxnews.com. And with the new CMS, we get to lose some of the extra code the old system threw into the page templates.
It's early, but from my point of view, this is a huge upgrade we will like a lot. By "we," I mean the team that did all the real work of making this happen these past months, while I mostly walked between cubicles, repeated old jokes and scarfed Hershey's miniatures.
That team includes Jim Michels, Amy Gelinas, Herb Himes, Glenn Franxman, Mike Takata, Brian Bruce, Amy Lawless, Matt Heisig, Rich Lacy, Mark McIntyre (his take on the project), Jonathan Bell, Ryan Berg, Nita Pettibone and many others who busted humps to get this done on time and in great shape.
On to Site 2, gang!
Both blogs
Mike: Their Django is the same as your Django ;)
There's still a lot of work to do to port Ellington to the major API and syntax changes that have hit Django lately, but once it's done it will open up a lot of new possibilities.
So, is this an Ellington based on current Django?
I believe it's somewhere in the 0.9 release range of Django, but I don't know which exact build we are using.
Not sure what changes, or how, when Django 1.0 comes around ... but I know the Lawrence crowd is determined to sync up Ellington releases with Django over time.
Neither can we! After Site 1, we expect the rest to be comparatively easy -- now we have a foundation down.
Lookin' good!
Indeed. Very nice job. Great to see Ellington working its magic for others as well as it does for us! Keep up the great work -- can't wait to see the rest of the Ellington-powered Scripps sites!
Nice design, but it took me a while to figure out "The Gleaner" was another newspaper.
Well done, guys - congratulations. Looking forward to seeing the rest unfold this year.
This one(Firefox 1.5.0.4):
"the line top: 110px;" F1504, render it as *relative to #leaderbody*, which already have "height: 110px;", so that is 110+110 px for the search bar. instead of other browsers rendered as 110px ONLY.
http://web.courierpress.com/static/css/article.css
#search (line 672)
{
background-image: url(http://media.elldev.scripps.com/static/images/bgs/serarch_bg_article.gif);
display: inline;
height: 45px;
left: 0px;
position: absolute;
top: 110px;
visibility: visible;
width: 984px;
z-index: 10;
}
===Ref====
#leaderboard {
background-image: url(http://media.elldev.scripps.com/static/images/bgs/leaderboard_bg.gif);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
height: 110px;
left: 0px;
position: absolute;
top: 0px;
width: 984px;
}
Jeroen ... not seeing what you're seeing in Firefox. Where on the page does the CSS break?
Duplicating here what I posted at http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2006/jun/15/courierpress/ just in case:
Looking at http://courierpress.com/news/2006/jun/12/welcome-new-site/ in Firefox 1.5.0.4 on Windows the CSS is overlapping.
It works in Opera 9 beta 2 and IE 6.
Also coming in the next release: world peace. :-D
Hurry! I want it now!!!
!!!!
(please)
As a former colleague of yours at Belo... HELP!!!!
We need something like Ellington. VelocIT sucks as bad today as it did the day it was (ill) conceived.
Hi, former colleague! Once we get another site or two under our belts at Scripps, we'd love to have a Belo contingent out to Knox Vegas to check out how we've deployed Django and Ellington.
You folks should have no problem leaping the hurdle that it's built on open-source technologies -- since VelocIT was, too. I can tell you this much: Ellington administration tools are clean and elegant, where VelocIT either required a heavy Java client or a workaround.
Hey Jay,
Excellent. Glad all the hard work paid off. Great team.
Cheers,
Svend