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Newspaper going online
| Posted by DomiNET.net, 05-14-2009, 09:30 AM |
| A local newspaper wants to go online. Do you know any engine (PHP) for this? Price is not an issue.
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| Posted by WO-Jacob, 05-16-2009, 01:03 PM |
| It really depends what their actual needs are.
You might start with Joomla and look at http://extensions.joomla.org/ for ways to fill the gaps
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| Posted by cselzer, 05-16-2009, 01:40 PM |
| django is based off of a news framework.
http://djangoproject.com
Python though. What would take me 8 hours to develop in PHP with all the advance features of most projects, take me not even an hour using django.
http://djangobook.com
Good reads. Definitely recommend looking into it.
EDIT: Let me rephrase what I said above. It takes 10 times longer to develop using PHP than using django. If you read their book (free) they explain to you that they could make whole web applications WITH an admin interface in less than a few hours of a notice it needs to be deployed for a news site. Not to mention, you don't even mess with sql, it does it all by itself. If you read there book on there, you will understand everything you need to know, may need to look a few things up, but you will be able to complete your project with ease, and not have to redevelop stuff you've done a hundred thousand times using PHP. Between myself and mwatkins, we could probably answer all your questions if you post with some issues if you decide using django.
Last edited by cselzer; 05-16-2009 at 01:46 PM.
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| Posted by mwatkins, 05-16-2009, 01:58 PM |
| There is also a custom Django product called Ellington which is designed for newspaper sites. http://www.ellingtoncms.com/
Orgs using Ellington include LJWorld.com, The Washington Post (I believe tihs is for some sub-sites / special features within their site), SCRIPPS, Las Vegas Sun, Naples Daily News. Ellington is a for-fee product.
Sites built using Django also include Arkansas Online, Santa Barbara Independent, The Daily Princetonian, Naples Daily News (in your area?), subsections of the L.A. Times and many others.
Depending on the size and scope of the newspaper in question it may be that at least considering Python / Django would be in their, and the OP's, best interest. If the newspaper has any IT capability at all, they are going to discover Django at least in passing all on their own. Best to get ahead of such stuff. Hopefully a hoster wouldn't look at supporting Django/Python as a hurdle but a new revenue opportunity, because that's exactly what it is.
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| Posted by Gary4gar, 05-16-2009, 02:06 PM |
| Is Django secure to be deployed?
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| Posted by cygnusd, 05-16-2009, 02:28 PM |
| Django as a framework by design incorporates built-in security features like automatic escaping of template variables, ORM sql bound variable quoting, CSRF protection, etc.
In those terms, then yes, Django (>=1.0) is secure.
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| Posted by mwatkins, 05-16-2009, 05:03 PM |
| All apps have bugs and all apps have potential exploits. That said the Python web framework community has had advanced XSS protection, automatic variable quoting and other such things for many, many, years. We are not talking flash in the pan - people that have been working on these toolsets and on Python itself have been doing it for more than a decade (Python is older than PHP yet more modern at the same time). Django is good deal younger but stands on the shoulders of others in that important lessons are of course incorporated into it. With the huge and active community around it, it gets continuous improvement. No, I would not myself be concerned about hosting Django apps.
Python itself has far fewer security advisories than PHP does, too. Security does not tend to be a thorny issue with Python and python apps, instead the execution and business model are more problematic for the average hoster.
There is some work being done on improving the ability to deliver almost-commodity like hosting for Python apps but quite frankly I don't expect the situation to ever look like PHP and for good reasons.
The issue for commodity web hosters is that they are used to the PHP model of execution. With most Python apps you are looking at allowing a long-running Python process and typically at least a few child processes of that. Many web hosters have no business model or control panel code to wrap around this, although if they can support long running Ruby apps they can do the same with Python. Specialized hosts that are offering this capability do exist out there.
Like I said, it's a new business opportunity and one which I believe will see some solid growth for a long time.
Django is but one Python web framework. Included in the very large selection are several well known and truly excellent Python web frameworks that all take a slightly different spin on things, ranging from the whole eco system around Zope (which itself has some specialized web frameworks) to Pylons / Turbogears and others. One unifying force among them all is support for WSGI which has an Apache mod_wsgi and the promise of making life easier for web hosting firms.
Not that bolting on a Python (or Ruby or Perl or ...) long running app to a front end web server is difficult. It isn't. Just different than what many are used to.
Last edited by mwatkins; 05-16-2009 at 05:07 PM.
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| Posted by mwatkins, 05-16-2009, 05:14 PM |
| One other comment regarding this - if you have a commercial client where money isn't the primary driving factor, a nice solution for them would be to offer shared mail/dns services that you may already be providing them, but host their application on a VPS account. If they are going to be doing customizations or software development, they'll certainly appreciate all the flexibility. A VPS (or more than one depending on size of client) with no services at all, made secure, sitting there just for development / staging / deployment of a custom Python / Ruby / whatever app - is just the ticket. At least that business model is easy to understand... and a VPS with 512MB of RAM and decent CPU application can run a pretty substantial Django (or most Python web frameworks for that matter) app.
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| Posted by HivelocityDD, 05-17-2009, 06:01 AM |
| I am not familiar with python but is there any frame work in PHP for news ?
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| Posted by mwatkins, 05-17-2009, 11:27 AM |
| I just want to be clear: Django is a general purpose Python web framework used in the construction of many thousands of sites of all sorts of varying purpose. It merely had its birth as a result of an in-house project for a large regional newspaper.
Ellington (note the Jazz musician theme with names...) is a custom for-fee product written with the Django tool kit. A much smaller set of news organizations use Ellington; many more have built their solutions using the free Open Source Django.
Zope and Plone (based on Zope) are other Python application frameworks or applications you find in newsy and magazine sites frequently too, just like PHP's Drupal often gets used for newsy/magazine sites, particularly in particular verticals.
If I were running the newspaper org's IT group I'd be looking across the spectrum at solutions and would weight highly the app's capability and ease of modification / customization. I would not care too much about what language it was written in. Maybe a PHP solution might float to the top, or perhaps a Python or Ruby solution might carry the day, but it would not be the language which would guide the solution choice.
My point in posting Python alternatives is not so much to promote Python, even if I believe it worthy of more attention in the commodity web hosting space, but to remind people to stop looking at every problem with a set of PHP solution blinders on as there is a much bigger world of choice out there, especially for businesses that aren't constrained by a 5$ a month do-all shared hosting account.
Last edited by mwatkins; 05-17-2009 at 11:30 AM.
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| Posted by Cmafai, 06-02-2009, 04:21 PM |
| I have seen some online newspapers running on Ruby which seemed to work out well, but I'd personally stick to Python. It's perfect for that type of work and, as other people have said, it is secure and fast to develop.
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