CMN freezes deployment of CP5
November 5, 2008 in College Publisher
Missed in the flurry of election news was this tidbit posted on the College Media Network blog on Monday: CP5 Development Plans #
Basically, CMN is freezing the deployment of College Publisher 5 until after the first of the year. There are currently 50 papers using the new platform. #
That said, Atex is making bigger investments in the development of CP5 and we are looking to more features being rolled out soon. In light of that, we are going to focus our resources on continuing our information gathering with the 50 newspapers using CP5, look at the strategic development plan for the next 8-10 weeks, and halt the launches of new partners on the new platform in the beta phase (until next semester). (emphasis added – ed.) #This is the first use of the term “beta phase” that I’ve seen regarding the roll-out of the new system. #This will enable our tech team to refine the scripts for conversion, improve the efficiency of moving a newspaper over, and create more support resources for both training and maintenance of support tickets. As the next few weeks progress, we will be outlining our plans here as they become more structured and detailed. #
In another interesting note, Lewis explains that all 50 newspaper sites are currently serving up from one 100GB database file. #
Here’s our previous coverage of College Publisher. #
Is this PR-speak for "we have a janky CMS and give up"?
WP
FTW
Serving 50 sites from a single "100GB database file" was indeed interesting, but only in that the statement struck me for its naivety. This is hardly abnormal, which any system administrator will tell you. He should have realized, unfortunately, that the comment would be taken the wrong way, and ultimately decried as ineptitude. To the contrary, the database system is likely state of the art, even at 100GB.
Andrew,
Where is the "decried as ineptitude" in my comment. I found it interesting that they are using a single database to serve out all these sites when they are looking to scale that up to 600 sites.
As Lewis noted in his original post:
"For context, it is important to understand that while this database configuration is not optimal right now, it was designed intentionally in this manner to make the sites in CP5 more flexible – both in publishing on a 24hr cycle versus an issue based model as well as making content extensible and modular."
Perhaps it would have been better to write a separate post rather than include it in this one.
Bryan,
I wasn't suggesting that you decried it as ineptitude. At most, I was only referring to a generalization of people who are particularly wary (or anti-) CP/CMN. Unfortunately, Lewis' comment was bound to be read into by those who don't understand database systems administration, which is why I shuddered when I first read it.
A single database "file" is infinitely more scalable — I'd be concerned if it wasn't one database. Most importantly, to the layperson, 100GB seems like a ridiculous amount of data — "up to 25,000 MP3s," I can hear college students equating it to — and most people would immediately suspect CP has no idea what they're doing. And while we all question that sometimes, here's an instance where we probably shouldn't. In reality, 100GB is child's play for a database, which can typically number in the many thousands of GB.
When I first read his post, I sent the link in an email to someone with the subject "Amateur hour." Their response was expected: "Why is it one giant 100GB file? I don't know anything about tech, but it can't be good to have 550 sites access a singe 100GB file." They had no idea (understandably) I was only labeling Lewis' explanation — not the database setup itself — as "amatreur."
Is the system optimal? I'm not sure any system ever is, and that's bound to be the case with CP based on track record. That said, I think Lewis' explanation was quite naive, and that includes his additional remarks you quoted. The words "100GB database file" was bound to raise eyebrows, even though a sysadmin wouldn't flinch at the thought.
Bryan, I think CMN has always had a beta tag on CP5; it's not new, although they certainly downplayed it. They seem to regard "beta" as if they're Google — it's released for widespread public use for a long time, and eventually the beta tag just goes away. I think most people, myself included, think of "beta" the way software developers have traditionally used it: pre-release software which is NOT ready for mission-critical production work. I think their labeling of CP5 as "beta" serves only to give them an excuse to waive a hand at problems and say "well, the software is still in beta." To me, that was and is ridiculous, when they have actively solicited many college newspapers, and landed about 50, to move their live web operations onto this platform.
But to me, there was more appalling corporate-speak in the accompanying post: "Though we have had some bumps along the way, this platform has performed exceptionally…" I think the gnashing of teeth and cursing in college newsrooms as sites have gone down, sites have worked very slowly, emails to readers haven't gone out for days and weeks on end, etc. exceeds the standard for "some bumps". I'd be willing to bet that a survey of college newspaper editors at the papers running CP5 would NOT describe the past two months on CP5 as "exceptional performance."
I don't take away from CMN that they were doing something different on an entirely new platform, and there were bound to be problems to overcome along the way. And I give credit to their small team for working long hours to be responsive and try to make things work for their newspaper users. But it seems clear to me that they launched before the software was really ready because they had previously over-promised and under-delivered and a new school year was starting and papers were clamoring for what CMN had been promising for many months. They ended up handing themselves and their newspaper users more problems than they should have. I think the two month "time out" sounds like a great idea, to give them time to step back, take a breath, address performance issues like optimization of the database and other things they haven't had time to do while launching new sites every few days, and to hopefully install upgrades from Polopoly/Atex without messing up sites the way some previous updates have done. I hope it leads to a much better 2009 for CMN and their newspaper users.
Eric,
thanks for the comment. I have heard similar tales from others who have deployed on the new system.
[...] needs to include moving off college publisher. They simply do not fulfill our needs, and with the demise of CP5, there is no hope of future growth. This should be a short-term goal. I strongly suggest we look at [...]