NPR’s Public Interactive Selects Drupal for Station Web Platform

Hi everyone.... I’m Doug Gaff, the recently-hired Director of Technology for Public Interactive, the division of NPR that provides Web products, services, and infrastructure for public media stations. Public Interactive will soon pilot our latest product, Core Publisher. Core Publisher is our next-generation Web platform designed to help stations rapidly build a digital presence online, publish locally-relevant content and increase local audience engagement.

At the heart of Core Publisher is its content management system, or CMS.  A CMS allows people to build both the structure and content of a Web site with minimal knowledge of the underlying languages and technologies of the Web. There are many fine open source CMSes out there today, including Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, Plone, Django and numerous others.

After an extensive review of these CMSes, we chose Drupal for Core Publisher. While all of the major CMSes are excellent in their own right, Drupal was an especially good fit for the platform. It’s one of the most extensible and general-purpose CMSes in use today. It has one of the strongest and most active open source communities. The module library is very extensive and diverse. Drupal is well suited for deploying to mobile devices, and there is a strong affinity for Drupal in the public media space.

To help accelerate our development of Core Publisher, NPR has also contracted with Acquia, the leading Drupal commercialization partner and home of the architect of Drupal, Dries Buytaert. Acquia has embedded one of their senior engineers on-site with NPR as we build the product, and we’re already leveraging their vast expertise in architecture, development and deployment.

To keep up with the project and product updates, you can follow our Core Publisher blog.