[eliot_sykes]

I'd love to read more about the Guardian CMS that Scribe was written for and how the writers find using it. Do they like it?

When I've worked on news sites in the past, many of the journalists preferred writing in their desktop word processor of choice and cutting and pasting into the CMS as the final step before publishing.

The CMS was probably viewed as a necessary evil and I don't remember there being much love for it from the people who had to spend hours in it everyday.

Partly this was due to the CMS not working offline and it just wasn't as pleasant to use as the software the writers have used for years, which is understandable.

[theefer]

They're quite happy with it (except when it breaks, understandably). Mostly, they just want it to work as they expect (i.e. like Word or Google Docs), so the goal is for them to not notice it. Doing the Right Thing on paste from GMail or Google Docs (a very frequent use case) is therefore crucial. At the same time, we want to rely on Scribe to enforce correct, standard typography rules, valid markup (unlike if it were free-form HTML), etc.

We're only at the beginning, but the curly quotes plugin mentioned in the blog post is a good example of that. Other ideas in the pipeline include automatically enforcing and converting to UL/LI lists instead of paragraphs with bullet point characters, warning on punctuation issues, etc.

Scribe has also allowed us to integrate contextual options, such as buttons to add images when the caret is on an empty line, or a button to embed any URL pasted into the body.

So the biggest challenge is therefore to provide a reliable UI that responds as one would expect, while allowing extra features to be built on top of it without too much effort.

[eliot_sykes]

Wow it sounds great and thanks for taking the time for the detailed answer. If there exists now or in the future a screencast or gif of a power user writing an article on the CMS please share it on HN. Although I have a feeling it'd make some devs stuck with an older CMS weep a little.

[ollysb]

I used to work on a CMS in the telecoms sector. We found the authors absolutely hated using online editors and much prefered word. We decided to use WebDAV to let them directly edit articles in word. They were able to hit save in word, refresh the browser and see their changes instantly. Because we were parsing the word docs ourselves we were able to choose which formatting to support. This meant we could allow different size headers for example but not different fonts.

[eliot_sykes]

Perhaps CMSes would serve writers better if there was a focus on providing amazing import tools that work with existing file formats, like .doc, that writers prefer and have used their whole careers. Maybe there is too much effort expended on reinventing the word processor in a CMS.