Compare and contrast

Luke Vnenchak gives us an update on Scoop, the in-house CMS in place at the New York Times. It's really interesting to see how (or even whether) a CMS solves certain problems. Among them:

• Scoop provides for multiple versions of draft/published stories: this blows the doors off CQ5's simple (but effective) author instance/publish instance model.
• Automatic smart cropping of images, given a master and a thumbnail. I've had clients that would love a feature like that.
• Locking body copy independently of assets like images and multimedia. Yep, that's also something that my guys demand.
• Tagging to an open standard: I haven't built any production code to support this, but it's something we have explored. Generally the stumbling block is the question of who owns the tags.

Storytelling

Product owner Patrick Cooper considers, then puts aside, a Wilderesque spin on an end-of-sprint demo for last year's project.

Serri wakes up all the stories… or something.