Building the NYTimes "Scoop" CMS using Drupal

The New York times have offered a glimpse into their internal Content Management System, “Scoop”. Looking at the reveal article, we were compelled with the functionality and level of polish the CMS appears to bring to the table. Naturally, this got us thinking what kind of work would be required to replicate some of the key features of the CMS in Drupal and what kind of trade-offs exist between leveraging existing Open Source solutions and building proprietary in house technology.

Story Budgeting and Planning

The story planning described in the NYTimes article would probably have many possible Drupal implementations ranging from more generic configurable options to more customised and development intensive solutions.

On the surface, a few tools that exist in the Drupal world to assist with this feature are Views, DraggableViews and Editable Views, however it would probably require some careful integration to build a meaningful and polished tool like the one described in the article.

Track Changes and Comments

Out of the box, Drupal's revisions can be used to show a visual diff of what has changed between two versions of a field. The article goes into detail about having granular control over the approval of specific chunks of a document, which is something that is inherently missing in the Drupal ecosystem. A similar, but less granular workflow could be achieved using diff and the workflow module.

If we wanted to use the Open Source ICE editor, plugging it into Drupal's WYSIWYG API would be a relatively easy task. Hats off to NYTimes for contributing this editor, it looks like a very polished and useful tool for the industry.

Drafts and Workflow

The Workflow project is designed to be a flexible publishing workflow tool that can be applied to different organisational structures. It integrates with all of the core roles, permissions and publishing system, so it offers quite a tight integration when combined with other solutions that offer enhancements to those core mechanisms.

Real-Time Collaboration

The article describes using a simple lock system to prevent authors from stepping on each others toes. Drupal implements a similar workflow out of the box, notifying users when trying to save content that has been modified, so in a way this already exists.

One of the design goals mentioned in the article is to have field level locking. The Field lock project advertises this functionality, but it would most likely be a case of reviewing, extending or enhancing the project to match the requirements closer.

Private Articles

Drupal’s core author concept and the roles/permissions system would likely be sufficient for granular permissions based access.

Tagging Content

The way NYTimes describes their tagging systems sounds like a machine learning algorithm. While Drupal has comprehensive support for “tagging”, a la the Taxonomy system, the automation aspect is something I haven't personally encountered. The Auto Tagging project does look compelling, however it would likely need work to bring it up to the same level of polish.

Notifications

Not much detail is given about the kind of events that can trigger notifications, however a Drupal solution to this feature would most likely be a combination of the Rules API and some tailored user configuration. This follows in line with Drupal’s philosophy of developer empowerment and providing APIs designed for low level integration and customisation.

Photos

Drupal’s core image style system is comprehensive with plenty of modules available to enhance the kind of operations you can do to images. You can scale, crop, rotate, convert and filter images for whatever the front-end situation calls for. The image style system also has an API that allows you to extend the kind of things you do to images.

One of the cool features demoed on Scoop is the ability for admins to specify focus areas of the image. The ImageField Focus module provides a very similar admin experience. From what we've experienced in the past, the module does not support multiple focus areas, however it would probably be a relatively trivial feature to contribute via the issue queue.

Throw Picture into the mix and you can achieve an IE compatable, responsive multi-image variant system using very little development work.

Adding Multimedia to an Article

One of the compelling featured demoed in this section was a region based layout editor. While the point was to show how you can drop multi-media into a page, Drupal has a similarly powerful system, the “swiss army knife of site-building”, Panels. Combine this with something like Panelizer and you have a powerful, per content-item layout editor.

Here is a Panel designed to set up a customised layout for an entire page, however a system could be built for a variety of news article layouts:

Auto-Suggesting Content

An Open Source stack in the Drupal ecosystem that could be used as a powerful suggestion engine would be Apache Solr + Drupal's Search API + Entity Reference. While there might be some glue required, the underlying tools to achieve a recommendation based article-to-video reference are all available for Drupal.

Web and Mobile Preview

The pixel-perfect preview of articles in Scoop does sound compelling. Drupal's core preview functionality has been a long standing pain point for site builders, however the Page Preview project does aim to improve the status quo, however this round probably goes to Scoop. Well played.

Content APIs

A big push in Drupal 8 is to have Drupal be a first class REST server out of the box. This seems to be a trend that many modern frameworks are rightly adopting. Drupal 7 has a Services framework which has similar design goals.

Summing Up

If we were to attack these requirements using Drupal, we would likely scope the project out in much greater detail and a lot of the approaches we have discussed might prove to be inappropriate. The whole project would likely have ended up as an install profile, a common set of Drupal modules and configurations built to be installable, reusable and most importantly supported by Drupal's incredible community.

I believe that competition in the CMS space is a great driver of innovation, and maybe NYT will consider Open Sourcing the entirety or individual components of their CMS, much like they have done with their text editor.