Good Software for Editorial Management?

cardoso asks: "I'm editor of a Brazilian news site, with a few permanent writers and a dozen occasional collaborators, and all the assignments are hand-made. I wrote a few queries for productivity stats (thanks heaven for MySQL), but the everyday tasks are not automated. What I really need is software to organize the stories: who's doing what, deadlines, production stats and assignments. It may be standalone or a Drupal module. I tried all the popular project packages, but they're too generic. Are there any solutions specially crafted to the online publishing market?"

Ellington

[RunFatBoy.net]

If you have 10K to drop, try out Ellington ( http://www.ellingtoncms.com/ [ellingtoncms.com] ).

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ [runfatboy.net] -- Exercise for the rest of us.

pear.php.net

[mr_stinky_britches]

Well, if you can do some SQL and basic OO programming...I recommend looking into the database packages over at http://pear.php.net [php.net]. Specifically, the DB_DataObject and related packages make creating a simple database and user interface for this pretty easy. Probably 1 or 2 days work if you know what you're doing, tops.
And if you think it is a little beyond your current skillset, perhaps you can find a developer who has worked w/ the pear libraries before to create it for you (I'm sure they have a mailing-list that would be useful for you, asl well).
Good luck!

Re:Nice editing

[grcumb]

'"A few permanents writers", nice editing slick. :)'

He's Brazilian. Unless you're willing let him critique your Portuguese, I'd suggest you not be so quick to complain. 8^)

Bricolage

[grcumb]

Bricolage [bricolage.cc] has a lot of what you're looking for, and it's very well built.

Here is a good intro [perl.com] to what it is and how it works.

Basecamp

[Jaza]

It sounds like what you're really looking for is a project management solution. Assigning tasks (such as 'write a story about x', 'cover the situation in y for the next 2 weeks'), settings deadlines, and co-ordinating groups or individuals - this all has very little to do with 'content management' as most people think about it.

Drupal has you covered with organising your content (taxonomy), tracking history and versioning, and establishing an editorial workflow (actions and workflow). But it doesn't have project management well covered (the 'project module' is too specific to software development), and there are no Drupal modules that I'm aware of, for integrating such management with actual content handling.

I think that Basecamp [basecamphq.com] would do the job best for you. It has all these PM facilities, in a very intuitive and easy interface.

Re:Ellington

[nequeo]

Ellington is based on Django (http://www.djangoproject.com), and seems to be well suited for creating "CMS-y" type applications. I've had a little play with it myself, and like what I've seen so far. If you're end up deciding to 'roll your own', I'd definately take a look at Django over PHP as a starting point.

Review Site for Open Source CMS

[carpeweb]

This doesn't cover all the CMS you might want to investigate (nothing costing $10K, for instance, in case that really is something you want), but http://opensourcecms.com/ [opensourcecms.com] has dozens of systems installed for demo use, so you might be able to get a sense of whether one of them would be appropriate. I have found that the demo versions don't have all the modules, so it wouldn't surprise me if you can't actually "test drive" any project management modules for the systems. For general demo, though, it's pretty cool.

One of the volunteers on that site also runs http://ongetc.com/ [ongetc.com], which has summary information on a few more CMS possibilities. The first site is restricted to open source tools that use PHP/MySQL. The second site seems less restrictive. I'm still looking for more general sources.

two other cms

[Abstract]

As you already use the Drupal CMS you probably don't want to switch to another CMS. However if you do, you may want to take a look at these other options:

* http://www.mmbase.org/ [mmbase.org]
* http://typo3.com/ [typo3.com]

Both are open source packages, and both are very feature rich. I also believe both offer some form of work flow management.
I'm not sure because during my evaluation I noticed both packages had too many features for my use. I ended up using Drupal.

Zope/Plone

[be_kul]

It sounds to me that he rather needs a CMS for managing online content, not really a project co-ordination system. Therefore, Zope/Plone as front-end to the already existing (?) MySQL-database should be fine: comes with a lot of managing tools, workflow template etc. and allows easy customization. And it's free. And: there is a strong, large, and friendly community helping to fix any problem very fast. For the 10k (US-$?) he could get a lot of additional work done if needed. Ah, yes: And one of the main Plone developers is from Brazil :-)