Quick introduction from Scrippsland

Hi, all. I'm Jay Small, director of online audience and operations for the newspaper division of E.W. Scripps Co., and an occasional consultant on interactive media strategies.

Thanks for allowing me to join. I'm here because Scripps has a number of pilot development projects in works for which Drupal appears to be a good fit. Recently I've been building prototype product sites for internal consideration using first 4.7 and now 5.1, and believe Drupal has come a very, very long way since I first tried it a couple of years back.

If you follow recent Scripps history, you know we are moving the cores of our newspaper.coms into the Ellington content management system, which is built on the Django framework and Python programming language. To be clear, our forays into Drupal-based projects don't reflect any change in our overwhelmingly positive opinions about Ellington and Django, or our intentions to do custom Django development where we don't see good technology alternatives.

Instead, we're simply recognizing the things Drupal does really well are different from the things Ellington does really well. I'm finding it pretty speedy to create working site models in Drupal for all kinds of things (shopping, file sharing, multiuser blogging, community news sharing). It makes a good modeling environment and allows us to put product ideas in front of users in controlled testing and even public betas. More to come from us, and I'm excited to see what the rest of this group is working on.