WoodWing and Acquia: moving from print to the web
A couple of days ago, Acquia announced a technology partnership with WoodWing. WoodWing's Enterprise 6 Content Publishing Platform now ships with Acquia Drupal as the default CMS, as well as a connector module. WoodWing's typical customers are traditional publishers with strong roots in print -- and with names like Time Inc, Cisco, Michelin, Citibank and many more, they have an impressive list of customers at that.
For most publishers, print continues to decline, and the web continues to grow. It is no surprise that their online strategy has become increasingly important for them. Many are in the process of optimizing their tools, processes and people for the web, rather than for print. It is a very disruptive change if you're a 100-year old organization that is optimized for print.
As publishers get settled on the web, they learn that it is not about broadcasting a message. On the web, it is about having a dialogue with your readers. As a publisher, you have to figure out how to turn audiences into participants because it opens the doors for better advertising and new monetization opportunities. Clearly, it doesn't suffice to copy-paste the content that you prepared for print into your web content management system.
As the web continues to evolve, readers will have a much richer experience online, and as a result, I believe print media will end up being a lead generation tool for the website, not the other way around as it often is today. Drupal's combination of content management and social software capabilities helps publishers to stay on top of this trend, and provides their writers and journalists the tools needed to be successful on the web.
But just like WoodWing's customers can benefit from Drupal, I think Drupal can learn a lot from WoodWing, and the issues that their customers have to deal with. As I write this blog post, I'm in Greece attending the WoodWing Publisher Conference, not only to educate WoodWing partners and customers about Drupal, but also to learn more about WoodWing's technology and challenges their customers are faced with. Like Drupal, WoodWing has a great community sharing both expertise and ideas. I really believe this partnership is a great match on many different levels.
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Bryan House
It is that phase of my life! I'm just turning 30 in a month, working with Drupal for 7 years and just had my third Acquia anniversary a week ago. Time to look back and evaluate how things went, all the good and bad things; even better if the wisdom can be shared with others. This was part of my thinking when I submitted the session titled "Come for the software, stay for the community" for Drupalcon Copenhagen.
Gábor Hojtsy
It sounded like a really simple request: "Is it easy to add a search filter for 'My posts'?". In other words, add a search result facet for posts by the current (logged in) user through the Apache Solr Search Integration module APIs?
But then the wheels start turning - we want not just one blind link, but a real facet link that tells us how many results we'll get. Also, if we are filtering by 'My posts' then we probably have an equal use case for the opposite filter 'Posts not by me'. So we really need a facet block with two links and facets counts.
Peter Wolanin
