So what do you think of our new website?
Don’t worry if you can’t answer that yet. Take a minute. Look around. Scroll up and down this page. Watch the video above. We’ll be here for a while.
While I wait, let me tell about one thing you probably won’t notice when clicking around the site. It’s what’s going on behind your computer screen that I’m most interested. “In the cloud,” as they say. The guts. The brain.
Whatever you want to call it, its name is Drupal. It’s a powerful digital publishing platform that we’re launching this week to take Marketplace into the digital future.
Drupal is technically known as a content management system, or CMS. In the most general terms, a CMS allows you to publish content to the web. Blog platforms like Tumblr and WordPress are CMSs. The previous generation of CMSs, however, are much more complex and monolithic. That’s the kind Marketplace has had for the last decade. Ours was called Itasca, named for a lake in Minnesota. And those of us who worked on it day in and day out would agree with this statement from The Observer in its feature about web pioneer and Slate.com founder Jacob Weisberg:
“When media people talk about the future of publishing online… they don’t talk about the site with the 12-year-old CMS,” the Observer wrote of Slate’s legendary CMS. “Slate is about as technologically sophisticated as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It was born in 1996, which is not just pre-Twitter, but pre-Google, a time when people got online by opening the CDs AOL sent them in the mail.”
Drupal is different. It’s built for seeking out and for discovery. It’s built for sharing. It’s built for listening. It’s built for being social and communal. And most important, it’s simple to use. With it, you can create content much more quickly and easily than most alternatives. And Drupal can deliver that content to more people and places in new ways than ever before, to social media networks, podcasts, mobile apps, and our new website.
The best part is there is so much more to come: Your Facebook feed, your Twitter stream, your email inbox, your iPhone, your Flipboard app, your RSS feed. How about your TV? And what about those devices that aren’t even invented yet?
I hope you’ll take a moment to meet Drupal for yourself. Create an account. Click around.
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
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