A look inside the guts of the New York Times’ CMS

It’s not every day you get a chance to look at the inner workings of the New York Times. But Luke Vnenchak, the paper’s director of technology, gave us just such an opportunity this week on the Times’ Open blog.

And by inner workings, I really mean the guts of the operation. Vnenchak described, in great detail, how the Times’ content management system, called Scoop, works, why it works the way it does, and how the Times hopes to continue to develop the CMS in the future.

It’s a little dense, but as the Times’ David Carr wrote in his recent profile of Medium:

Sitting behind all the work you see on the Internet are so-called content management systems. It’s plumbing, boring, really, but sites like FiveThirtyEight and Vox.com are building something interesting because they have great, innovative tools.

Not to go all nerdy on it — well, a little — the content management system is destiny.

It’s interesting to read about how some of the issues discussed in the leaked Times innovation report are playing out in the development of Scoop. Even the venerable New York Times is trying to think of the web as a medium on par, at least, with print.

Even more interesting to me, though, is the idea that the Times wants to create a CMS that will work with any kind of platform:

Unlike many commercial systems, Scoop does not render our website or provide community tools to our readers. Rather, it is a system for managing content and publishing data so that other applications can render the content across our platforms. This separation of functions gives development teams at The Times the freedom to build solutions on top of that data independently, allowing us to move faster than if Scoop were one monolithic system.

It strikes me that that’s a pretty good way for us to think as individuals too. Master whatever tools and systems we’re working with today, but the really important skills are the ones we can use on whatever tools and systems are developed in the future.