The Drupal's Way for France24
This is an answer to Dries Buytaert post (http://buytaert.net/france24-using-drupal) about France 24 and Drupal
Why France24 has changed his CMS and chosen Drupal?
Six months ago France24.com was still using Magnolia as CMS. The system suffered several problems (lack of performance, a lot of bugs, maintainance difficulties...). The first version of the website was developped using a fork of the community branch of Magnolia. This choice was firstly made to answer France24's needs in a hurry and it was developed in only three months to be online in time for 6 December 2006.
After six months of use, the system was clearly falling appart, and we decided to migrate our CMS to a platfom much more stable and flexible. And we had to do it without any impact for the end user.
The front office of the application was ok. We only needed to recreate the back office modules. In fact the whole platform!!!
We chose an Open Source solution for two reasons: cost and independance. After a benchmark, we were convinced that PHP & Drupal were the best choices. After six moths of work with France 24 dev team, Vincent Caillerez, Polyconseil and Linagora the new france24.com was ready: three languages, four million users, 10 to 50 journalists working on it and new functionalities every week...
We will soon be publishing some code extracted from the platform. Stay tuned :)
What really happened
As so often, the reasons are personal, not technical. Magnolia was switched out because a new team came into play at France24 that only had php knowledge.
Regarding the claims that the system was falling apart, I have never heard of that. ALl I know is that it has been built in a mere 3 months by a company that was not a Magnolia partner nor trained by Magnolia, and Magnolia International (the company) has not been involved in the development nor deployment of the site. Hence, I would be surprised if the implementation would be up to the standards that Magnolia and its official and certified partners set for their deployments.
As a side note, it was funny to see that the new system was only able to replace 2 out of three languages for about 6 months, during which the arabic section still ran under Magnolia. I am sure that had nothing to do with the choice of platform.
Regards
Boris Kraft
CTO Magnolia International
Mikiane on France24 ! Oh no !
Damn ! You here ! I thought you were egocasting with you hyper-buzzed-fashioned-hyped-Facebook friends.
:P