yelvington.com

In addition to newspapers and radio stations, my employer has been quite busy in the travel media business. Over the last couple of years, Morris Communications has acquired several companies, combined them with existing assets, and realigned them all under a coherent brand identity: Where Guestbooks, Where Magazines, Where Quick Guides, and Where Maps. But there was no unified Web presence for all of the above ... until last Friday, when the "Local Guides. Worldwide." WhereTraveler.com launched in "beta test" form.

In each city, the Where resources provide local directories of dining and entertainment resources for business and personal travelers. If you've stayed at a good hotel in a major city, you've probably seen and perhaps used one of the Where publications -- perhaps under a previous identity, such as Guest Informant or Best Read Guides. This initial stage of the WhereTraveler project makes most of those resources available on the Internet.

Like a lot of what we're doing these days, WhereTraveler.com was built on the Drupal framework. It makes thorough use of open-source add-on modules including the Content Construction Kit and Views. To open the door for Where editors in many different places to edit content in just their own domains, it uses the Domain Access module created at Morris Digital Works and contributed to the open-source community.

The website and its companion service aimed at the iPhone are just the first steps in a larger project that will unfold over the coming year.

After months of testing, Drupal 6 was officially released today, and I've already upgraded. There are a number of improvements and enhancements that will be of interest to news sites.

One of them is core support for user-configurable workflow through an interesting system of triggers and actions. For example, I quickly created a set that sends me an email any time anyone posts a comment on my website so that I can review it.

I previously had a special-purpose module that did that. With the new core support for triggers and actions, I can easily create my own sets that meet unforeseen needs by just filling out a couple of forms and pressing "enter." For example, I might choose to promote an item to the top of a page if it's getting comments, or change the publication status at a particular time, or block a bot that might succumb to a "honeypot" form.

Setup is radically improved, especially if you're installing from scratch, which is a breeze. If you're upgrading an existing system that has been heavily modified -- which generally is the case for large news sites -- there can be "gotchas," as there are major changes in some of the Drupal internals.

Theme development (page templating) is greatly improved, especially with the devel module, which is a separate module. It demystifies some obscure points of Drupal theming, much as Firebug does for HTML developers.

Other improvements affect large-scale site performance, usability, Ajax enhancements, permissions and scripted events.

All in, it's a greatly strengthened foundation and I know a lot of our tech guys are chomping at the bit to start migrating sites to the new platform. However, some critically important modules such as Views are still in a state of flux, so don't expect to see large-scale sites launching or migrating overnight.

As usual, the core developers are already hard at work on the next big version.

"If the only tool you have is a hammer," said psychologist Abraham Maslow, "you tend to see every problem as a nail." I thought about that as I examined a couple of recently launched websites: The Industry Standard and NotchUp, both of which bear the "beta" label acknowledging their concepts are only partially baked.

The original Industry Standard was a business magazine aimed at the magical new economy that was being created by the Internet. It went dot-poof when the first dot-boom turned out to be a dot-bubble that dot-burst.

The new Industry Standard is a website, but it's not an online magazine. While it has some news and opinion that a writer would recognize, it's really a "prediction market" that attempts to capture and wisdom from the community. You "bet" on positions, such as "Yahoo to accept Microsoft acquisition." If you're right, you win virtual money that gives you a more powerful voice in future "betting." In theory, the result is a powerful indicator, like the stock market.

NotchUp is an employment marketplace built not around scarcity of jobs, but scarcity of good candidates from specific jobs. The big twist on the usual "post your resume and get a job" offer is that NotchUp promises to charge the potential employer for the contact information and pay you for the interview.

You also get some sort of percentage on anyone you recruit to join the system, a viral marketing trick that explains why I got a blizzard of invites over two or three days.

Both of these sites, interestingly, are built on the open-source Drupal CMS platform. This gets us back to the point about Maslow's hammer. Given the same toolkit, how would a newspaper company respond? For that matter, how many cutting-edge Web 2.0 pundits would have built the usual blog-centric presentation, with maybe a little bit of sweet Ajax goodness thrown in?

We are all subject to the Maslow's hammer effect.

In an awesomely detailed post, the editor of Schamper, the student newspaper at the University of Gent (Belgium) describes how he -- a philosophy major -- built a Web-centric content management system that outputs to Adobe InDesign for print, all based on the open-source Drupal CMS framework. How integrated is it? Well, when an editor opens a story, it's locked so others can't modify it. When it's stored, the XML output is updated and InDesign refreshes the layout. And oh, by the way, there's also a public-facing website. Great work, all integrated by someone who's not a professional programmer, and based on free code.

Drupal is disruptive innovation in action. Many people mistakenly think it's a blogging platform. It began as a communications tool for Belgian student Dries Buytaert to communicate with his dormitory buddies. It's built on open-source foundations (PHP, MySQL or Postgres). Over the last several years it's grown into a powerful, flexible and reliable tool for some pretty high-end projects. I believe Bluffton Today was the first newspaper to use it for the core of its site; now quite a few dailies up to the Virginian-Pilot are using it to power their websites. Now it's moving into print production.

I've been repeating myself a lot lately: "It's not about technology. It's not about technology." Nevertheless, I find myself being drawn back into the technology frequently, and last week I spent a day at the Barcelona Drupalcon, surrounded by a bunch of really smart guys (mostly guys, anyway) half my age.

I was "in the neighborhood" because BDZV, the German federation of newspaper publishers, had asked me to speak at an annual meeting. I hopped a cheap flight to BCN and slipped in a day at the four-day Drupal conference.

If ever you're in doubt about the power of the community-driven open-source development process, I'd encourage you to take in a conference like that one. There were 492 people registered for more than 80 sessions, and all of the sessions were nominated and chosen by the attendees in an open online process in the weeks before the conference (in other words, applying open process to the conference itself).

As you might expect, the hallways were full of high-energy conversations, and many of the developers skipped an evening or two of partying to write code in marathon sessions in apartments and hotels scattered around the city.

I appeared on a panel discussing participative news sites, probably the least technical panel at the whole show, and the room was packed. My panel was organized by our own Ken Rickard, who was involved in half a dozen other presentations through the course of the conference. Ken was vacationing with his wife in Spain and performing, as usual, above and beyond the call of duty.

Online journalism is not a matter of technology, but we need to use technology to do it. Tapping into a global community of thousands of really smart developers is a powerful way to get there.

Presentation notes and videos are being collected at Drupal.org.

Quite a few newspapers are now either using Drupal CMS or planning to use Drupal soon, so Nikolai Thyssen of Dagbladet Information in Copenhagen has created a space at groups.drupal.org. You can join at http://groups.drupal.org/newspapers-on-drupal.

An overeager antispam filter appears to have eaten all my comments data. I've restored from a recent backup, but a couple of notes are missing (from Jay Small and Howard Owens, if I remember correctly.)

While I was at it, I upgraded to the new Drupal 5 codebase. It's beta 1, so there may be some surprises.

And I switched from my own design to Drupal's new default theme, which I like a lot. I've been preaching a lot lately how "pride of authorship goeth before a fall." We all have to learn to embrace other people's work -- both content and technology. With that in mind, the design switch seemed appropriate. I actually wrote my own weblog software -- based on forum software I had written years previously. I switched to Drupal early last year.

For the time being, all comments will require my approval before they go live, due to abuses by blog spammers.