Wordpress for local TV site?

October 22, 2008 9:56 PM

Wordpress as CMS for a local TV/news site?

I'm a WP guy. Love it. Comfortable with it. But now that I'm the online producer for a local TV station, I've come face-to-face with WorldNow Producer. It's a corporate CMS: it works, but it's big, clunky, etc.

I don't have any delusions that I will be able to convert our site to a WP solution anytime soon...but would love to know if any smart MeFites can tell me if using Wordpress for a local TV site is a good idea.

It's fast, light, free, does video, etc, it's customizable, does everything a website needs. Right?

So surely there's some sort of "corporate" reason that WP isn't used. Security, maybe?

So: using Wordpress for a small-market TV station website. Mostly news, contests, community calendar, photo galleries, etc. Good idea?

posted by davidmsc to computers & internet (8 comments total)

One of the local stations here use it on their detailed forecast page and maybe in other areas.
posted by fluffy battle kitten at 10:08 PM on October 22, 2008

Interesting - thanks for the tip, fbk! (way cool name, BTW)
posted by davidmsc at 10:28 PM on October 22, 2008

If there's a corporate reason not to use it then someone forgot to tell the people at Ford.
posted by winston at 10:41 PM on October 22, 2008

The corporate reason is generally that it is free. Corporations exist to sell things and make money, and tend to be suspicious of and resistant to stuff outside that model. Corporations spend big bucks on things like CMSs because buying patterns have taught them that with the big spend comes big peace of mind.

Anyway, yes, it is a good idea. There are several news and magazine themes that are designed for or lend themselves very nicely to exactly that.
posted by DarlingBri at 11:35 PM on October 22, 2008

Nah, Winston, Google has given a warning to pretty much any corporation, as has the Department of Homeland Security. Whether they choose to heed those warnings or not is a different question.

In short, the reasons I've seen that small media outlets don't choose WP is abysmal security, poor scalability under heavy traffic without special add-ons or tricks, poor options for managing multiple sites/blogs, and lack of support for technologies like IIS, ASP, MS SQL Server or Oracle. There are more reasons, but those are the big ones, along with a lack of workflow and process features that they're probably used to with something like WorldNow.
posted by anildash at 7:51 AM on October 23, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

anildash: they're probably used to with something like WorldNow.

Would you mind expanding on this? WorldNow seems to sell just a suite of solutions for Publishing on the Web. I don't see anything about community, personal pages for users, forums, users galleries, contests, social applications, etc. How their workflow and process features would have any relevance for managing a community? Publishing on the Web and hosting a community are vastly different operations and mindsets. Do you have any example of seamless integration on the bases you seem to be advocating?
posted by bru at 8:44 AM on October 23, 2008

Sorry, was unclear there. What I meant is, platforms like WorldNow have tons of process features that are orthogonal to running a community site (and generally WorldNow doesn't have any "social" features to speak of), but that traditional IT types at a small local TV channel might expect to see in any platform that they work with.

I think those of us used to social sites are used to tools that are designed to help us publish or communicate, where WorldNow and old-school CMSes are designed to kind of prevent anybody from publishing too easily, lest the proper process not be observed.

The folks I'm talking about look at criteria like security, reliability, manageability and integration at the top of their list, and if they have to compromise on usability, user experience, or full-featured social abilities, they've generally been content to compromise.

N.B. I'm not advocating that mindset, just trying to explain it in the context of davidmsc's question as to why stuff that's open source or more native to the social web can seem scary to people who are less familiar with these tools. Some of the objections are legit, some aren't.
posted by anildash at 9:48 AM on October 23, 2008

Ah! I get it.
Very clear.
Thank you.

And I agree with your description: "security, reliability, manageability and integration at the top of their list". I would add "control". Losing "control" on content is one of the worst fear of mass media managers confronted with community tools.
posted by bru at 10:20 AM on October 23, 2008