Reading USAToday.com over a bowl of cereal this morning, I clicked on story about the Columbia shuttle disaster only to get an error about a non-existent domain. I checked the link:
http:// cms-preview-site2-t.usatin.usatoday.com/ tech/ news/ 2003-06-04-colu mbia-foam-test_x.htm
Looks like a “CMS preview” link accidently made it’s way into production.
I always get intrigued when I see things like this because I’m interested to know what content management systems the really big sites use. I viewed source on USA Today and found some code in HTML comments that I Googled, but I didn’t turn anything up. Too bad. I’d be interested to know.
Much easier is a site like ComputerWorld.com. View their source and right at the top you get:
<!— Vignette StoryServer 5.0 Tue Jun 03 15:23:58 2003 —>
Which leads me to another point: content management systems have URL signatures. You can tell a Vignette-powered site a mile away because the file name has about six commas in it (actually, it’s probably not a file name as much as it’s a key to a database record, but….).
Movable Type sites almost always have their individual entry pages in a folder called “archives” because that’s the default and a lot of people (myself included) never change it. Additionally, the individual pages are a number padded with zeros to make six digits. Look at sites like Gizmodo and ReachCustomersOnline — neither of them say they use MT, but you can figure it out after looking at a few URLs.
When I was working with Documentum last year, their WebCache product — which compiled and published pages to a Web server — included an HTML comment that promoted Documentum as the content management system of the site. (I just noticed that none of the HTML source on Documentum’s own site has the comment…) We shut it off, but I wonder if you could wheel-and-deal with a CMS vendor to leave it on in exchange for concesssions? “We’ll leave that HTML comment on so geeks like Deane Barker can see it in exchange for…”
Look at Wired — they have a Vignette-style URL, but no HTML comment. Maybe they didn’t get a free shirt or something?
Cruft-free URLs in Movable Type: Mark Pilgrim has created a great URL scheme in Movable Type for the cleanest URLs I've seen yet. Clean URLs are an anal-retentive obsession with me. I found this via a great page at Brainstorms and Raves devoted to URL beauty. Mark is using…
How to recognize a Weblog tool by its permalinks: We've written about CMS URL signatures before, but here's a handy guide for identifying them in the field.
Not sure if this press release is still relevant (October 2000), but it looks like USAToday.com uses their own, in-house developed CMS.
I know that a lot of really big content sites end up building their own, especially with a company like USA Today that has print stuff to worry about.
Knight Ridder created their own industrail-strength system and then open-sourced it:
Great site guys... Keep up the good work :)
This entry has become something of a comment spam magnet. I'm closing the comments.
