Clickability Review from a Prominent News Corporation
April 26, 2014

Clickability Review from a Prominent News Corporation

Dave Sell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Latest/cloud

Modules Used

  • CMS

Overall Satisfaction with Clickability

We use Clickability as a CMS to host the content for our websites, and deliver our web pages to our customers in Southeastern Wisconsin. We began by hosting our flagship site, www.jsonline.com but as a corporate initiave, eventually migrated all of the websites of our popular news corporation. In all, we have close to 200 websites that are all independently content-managed by the various newsrooms in the company.

Pros

  • Clickability's API allows us to integrate our newsroom print publishing system with our websites, as well as feeds from other sources.
  • Clickability has a robust content delivery and redundancy architecture which delivers "always-on" content delivery.
  • Clickability's template language allows us the freedom to innovate as we integrate with other systems.
  • Clickability gives us the ability to distinguish device type and deliver different solutions to different devices aka responsive web design.

Cons

  • The UI presentation was developed before tabbed-browsing became available/popular, thus you can run into serious trouble if you are not careful.
  • The security implementation, while allowing extreme granularity (good), has become extremely difficult to manage over time (bad).
  • We have written our own web-based front-end UIs in order to compensate for the somewhat awkward content entry experience that the UI provides.
  • I know a big positive is the fact that it is always-on. We are the leading news corporation for our state, and in many markets, nationwide. We pride ourselves on our strong ethics in the community and thus need to exude reliability to maintain the trust of these communities. Having a website fail periodically erodes that reliable perception.
  • It has allowed different areas of the company to approach our team and work in a cohesive manner.
We also use IIS with .NET to host some website functionality, but would not use that to host websites that simply deliver news content, and allow a newsroom to manage its own content. I have not used many other CMS's but others on my team have described them, and I have yet to hear anything that surpasses what Clickability can do for us. One faction in our corporation made a push to start using Wordpress, but was unable to justify any migration efforts.
We will evaluate other options.
Why give it a 10? I shudder at the thought of using anything else to manage and deliver websites reliably to our nationwide audiences. With our very minimal staff of software engineers (with great personalities) we have been able to innovate and satisfy our internal newsroom demands, which are high to the extreme. Our team is very agile and has adapted well to the changing times in the past 4 years that I have been senior software engineer, and team lead. The 10 is for flexibility, extensibility, reliability, and the freedom we experience as developers.

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