Mail & Gaurdian makes you a part of their redevelopment process

The Mail & Gaurdian, one of South Africa’s leading newspapers, ‘leaked’ some inside info about their main news site’s redevelopment. Going from ASP to PHP and going with a custom developed system rather than an Open Source solution.

I love it! I think it is a stunning move on behalf of Matthew and Vincent to keep readers/bloggers up to speed with the redevelopment process of the site. We’re so used to stealth tactics and keeping new development under covers to release with a bang that we tend to forget that doing the whole process in public could be just as effective as proven here. It almost create a sense of belonging. It creates a lot of interest. It is all-in-all pretty exciting.

I’d love to know more and I have a suspicion that if you’re going to ask, the guys will tell! Magic! So Vince, tell us. Are you going to use some sort of MVC framework or is development happening from the ground up?

6 Comments to "Mail & Gaurdian makes you a part of their redevelopment process"

• Vincent Maher said: On 02/06/2008 at 8:36 am

  Hi Stii, thanks for the kind words and we definitely think that making the process open is a good way to keep the audience happy and, incidentally, it also helps us do the right thing. I have been blogging this process on my blog here - http://vincentmaher.com/mit/?cat=172 and some of the feedback has been invaluable so far.

  Regarding your questions, we decided to use Symfony as our framework and then later decided against it so here are the final set of technologies we’re going to use:

  Hosting: Internet Solutions with 1.75 Tb of transfer per month allocated to the site. This excludes Amatomu, Amagama, Thought Leader and the other social media stuff we’ve done.

  Servers: At IS - 4x Dual dual-core Itel IBMs, 4Gb RAM and RAID3; at Rackspace in London - 2x dual-core AMD 64s with 2Gb RAM

  Software platform: LAMP, Fedora Core at Rackspace and Ubuntu at IS, though we’re still debating this

  MVC framework: CodeIgniter
  JS and Ajax framework: JQuery and ExtJS
  CSS framework: Blueprint CSS

  The CMS will be built using an ExtJS front-end and the public site will mostly use JQuery.

  Video will be hosted on Amazon S3

  What else do you want to know?

• [Online media] Screenshots of M&G Online mockups : Bizcommunity Blog said: On 02/06/2008 at 9:28 am

  [...] they’ve moved on since then. Read Vincent Maher’s comment on Stii Pretorius’ post for more details on CMS, hosting, servers and software platform. addthis_url = [...]

• Stii said: On 02/06/2008 at 10:12 am

  My goodness gracious! Thank you very much for that information man! I’ll have to think a bit of some more interesting things to ask, but sjoe! you sure covered the base here! Much appreciated and keep it up man!

• Vincent Maher said: On 02/06/2008 at 3:53 pm

  LOL, thought I’d hose you down with some info to pre-emptively avoid the difficult questions

• JohnSourcer said: On 03/26/2008 at 4:31 pm

  What do you need Jquery for?

• Vincent Maher said: On 03/27/2008 at 5:26 am

  @JohnSourcer We needed a lightweight library for doing various AJAX calls and a way to simplify the way we interact with the DOM. There will be several areas of the site that update via AJAX rather than page refreshes, and some other little bits of trickery.

Spit it out!

Filed in: Software Development, South Africa by: Stii