http://search.cpan.org/~mjd/Text-Template-0.1a/ Basic text templating; circa 1995. Using templates is hardly a new thing. I wrote a full CMS system for a news company in 2002. Sure that is a couple years later; but I based it on Text::Template in combination with XML; both of which existed in the mid 90s.
I am not attacking what they were doing, my point was that this is an issue of delaying the move to a template based system way longer than necessary. I am speculating on whether they did move to some templating, but not all the way, and wondering what exactly they were using before that.
Saying "static HTML files" is well and good, but it doesn't explain how they were created. By hand??
Also, saying "90 days to republish" seems to be suggesting some process they have in mind besides manually scraping the data out. If you have 1 million random files, scraping could easily take years not 3 months. It would be interesting to know what process they are suggesting to follow in those 90 days. My speculation is they did use some sort of outdated CMS software.
I am not attacking what they were doing, my point was that this is an issue of delaying the move to a template based system way longer than necessary. I am speculating on whether they did move to some templating, but not all the way, and wondering what exactly they were using before that.
Saying "static HTML files" is well and good, but it doesn't explain how they were created. By hand??
Also, saying "90 days to republish" seems to be suggesting some process they have in mind besides manually scraping the data out. If you have 1 million random files, scraping could easily take years not 3 months. It would be interesting to know what process they are suggesting to follow in those 90 days. My speculation is they did use some sort of outdated CMS software.