Video interview with Travis Swicegood from the Armstrong CMS project

Django has a long history in the news/media industry having been born at the Lawrence World Journal. Mediamorphmedia recently announced that they were going to get out of the content management business, and sold their popular EllingtonCMS to e-Publishing.com. While it remains to be seen whether ePublishing.com will be a good steward of the EllingtonCMS software, those refuge news media organizations now have an alternative: Armstrong CMS, an open-source publishing system designed for news organizations.

I got a chance to sit down with Travis Swicegood at DjangoCon to hear more about Armstrong CMS. Travis is the Director of Technology at Texas Tribune, where Armstrong CMS was created through a joint partnership with the Bay Citizen, and funded by a $1M grant from the Knight Foundation.

 

In this interview we discuss:

• How did the Armstrong project get started?
• How is the Knight Foundation involved?
• Who is Armstrong CMS for?
• Who are some early users of Armstrong CMS (i.e. The Daily Dot)?
• How is Armstrong CMS architected? (you can pick ‘n choose components rather than doing a full Armstrong install).
• What is the Armstrong CMS release process? (two releases per year that are stable and wo unstable releases – more experimental – not unlike Canonical’s release process for Ubuntu)
• What is your vision for bringing on new contributors?
• Why was Django chosen for Armstrong, and what are the benefits? (Django gets out of your way when you need it to. Dealing with the amount of traffic when your site is linked to by Huffington Post.)
• What are the long-term goals for Armstrong? (Anybody who starts a news media organization uses Armstrong. The ability to do custom things with your data is what differentiates you. Armstrong gives you that ability in a way that most CMSes don’t.
• What are the next big milestones for Armstrong?