Last week, I attended a presentation given by Sean Upton, Site Technology Supervisor, at the local open source software user’s group, SDOSS.
SignOnSanDiego.com, the online operation of The San Diego Union-Tribune, is the most visited online media outlet in San Diego County, with 2 million unique monthly visitors. Our online publishing data-center operations rely almost exclusively on free/open-source software, utilizing a top-to-bottom open-source technology stack; the Plone content-management system, Zope Application server,Python Programming language, and GNU/Linux operating system,as well as Squid, Apache,and MySQL.
Sean says, “We are not just using an expensive proprietary application on top of an open-source base, we see open-source software percolating to the (well-polished) application level, and the Plone/Zope combo, we are using, is a pretty good example”.
Presentation Topics included:
* What web content management with Zope and Plone can do for businesses
* An introduction to Zope and Plone
* Brief demonstration of Plone-based applications
* Our core architecture: Squid, Zope, Plone – putting these pieces together.
* How we interact with the open-source communities and companies supporting our software
* How Plone, Zope, and Python are strategic to our business
* Observations about open-source software higher on the “stack”
There are approximately 65 employees at SignOnSanDiego.com in sales, editorial and technical. Open source is presently used for tactical areas such classifieds, archives gateway (validating against 330,000 home delivery subscribers) and contest management, where it is easier to deploy with less risk. Moving to more strategic areas is scheduled in the next one to two years.
I asked Sean about the limit on archive searches (only back to 2001) which I thought might be some sort of technology issue, but it turns out it’s a legal issue having to do with the legal rights of freelance contributors.
A fascinating peek behind the curtain!