Slate has launched a new publishing system, and with it a series of new features, including a new “social stream” that highlights the stories that readers are most interested in at the moment. This is also noteworthy because Slate, one of the earliest web content sites, had been working all these years on a content management system appropriately named Gutenberg that was built more than a decade ago — one that was a remarkable achievement in its time and amazing in that it lasted so long.
It’s core was also used as the foundation for MSNBC.com’s publishing system. “Gutenberg, may it rest in peace, was an extraordinary tool in its time but at the time of its demise was perhaps the oldest piece of working software in the media business. It was the B-52 bomber of software, the Volvo station wagon of CMSes,” says editor David Plotz
Here’s a summary of the main improvements you will find on the site:
Start with our homepage, which is cleaner and more image-rich than it used to be. You may notice that we’ve altered a few colors here, shifted a font there, but nothing too drastic. Below our cover story you’ll see the first major addition, a box displaying a rotating series of headlines.
We call it the “Social Stream,” and it’s a way of highlighting stories that readers are most interested in at this moment—the stories they are reading, commenting on, liking on Facebook, and tweeting. This is one of several new efforts to make Slate more social, encouraging more reader participation and conversation.
As you continue down the page, you’ll arrive at our modified table of contents, the headlines of everything we’ve published recently. In old Slate, the table of contents was a confusing place, with two separate tabs, one for Slate articles and one for Slate blog posts. Now everything is in a single list, with the most recent items—whether blog posts or articles—at the top. Images illustrate all these headlines, and there are also buttons enabling you to tweet, share, and comment from the homepage. You can use the black bar above the table of contents to sort the stories as you wish, viewing the most popular ones, or the most commented, or the most liked on Facebook, or the hottest on Twitter.
The left side of the homepage has a special features box, a version of which appears elsewhere on the site too. We’ll use it to highlight big stories we’re particularly proud of, upcoming events, and other Slatey goodness that doesn’t fit in that day’s table of contents.
Regular Slate articles, such as the one you are reading right now, also sport some changes. If you have a wide monitor, you’ll see the vertical toolbar to the left of the story. This will move down the page as you scroll, allowing you to share, print, email, and comment from anywhere in the article. On narrower screens, that bar becomes horizontal and stays at the top of the article. We’ve also significantly improved the navigation of our Mad Men “TV Club” and other multipart features, making them much easier to follow.
If you poke around a bit, you’ll find two improvements to the site that are years overdue: section pages and author pages. In old Slate, the “Technology section” was simply a list of stories. Now each of our major sections has its own homepage, with its own cover stories and table of contents. So if you just want to focus on today’s political coverage—and why not, when you get to read John Dickerson and David Weigel and Jacob Weisberg, Dahlia Lithwick andWilliam Saletan and Christopher Hitchens?—you can see all of it in one place atslate.com/articles/news_and_politics.html. We’ve added new sections for Sports and “Double X,” and split Business and Technology into their own sections. You can see the new sections in the maroon navigation bar at the top of every page.
The new author pages collect all the work of your favorite Slate writers in a single convenient location. Say you’re a huge Annie Lowrey fan, as I am: Navigate over tohttp://www.slate.com/authors.annie_lowrey.html for a catalog of all her stories. (This formula will work for every Slate writer: http://www.slate.com/authors.firstname_lastname.html.)
