I had planned to write about the redesign of the Cornell Daily Sun online, but held off until now. Their current feature seems to be some kind of exotic hard-to-get “tease” when you try and read their stories:

As a new feature, it seems like the online branch of the Cornell Daily Sun is just a home page. They even gave up on their old/new design in favor of trying to recreate their old site after complaints from readers. The problem with the Sun online is that they’re using Drupal without sufficient Drupal-oriented staff. Drupal’s a terrible and complex beast to use on this kind of small project. A homegrown system, or another CMS, would have probably served them much better.

Someone (I can’t remember who but it might be here) said that the Cornell Daily Sun’s newspaper is uselessly fulfilling needs that they could better meet online. And, we can clearly see that their online paper is dead in the ether. Therefore, the Cornell Daily Sun shouldn’t exist?

4 Responses to “Cornell Daily Sun: Dead in the Ether”

1. Dean Strelau says:

   9/4/2006 at 10:13 pm

   Thanks, Elliott. The bashing the Sun has taken from you and Montoya lately is just priceless.

   (And no, I’m not working with them anymore)

   Reply
2. Robert Ochshorn says:

   9/5/2006 at 6:36 pm

   Explanatory disclosure, please? http://www.cornellsun.com/node/34

   Reply
3. Elliott Back says:

   9/5/2006 at 8:58 pm

   I moved some stuff from their old to their new db, but what’s happening is really out of my hands. I was only marginally involved to begin with, anyway, and my interest waned with their managerial predilection for drupal…

   Reply
4. Sam Jackson says:

   9/9/2006 at 1:26 pm

   I did a CMS design / implementation over the summer for a nonprofit in town (hey, didn’t finish the latter part… hooray) and I decided on Joomla! because of my laziness and lack of skill. Someone onsite asked me if I’d considered Drupal and I just looked at them in horror…

   The Cornell Daily Sun is not as exciting as I might have hoped.

   Reply