What do Virgin Radio and GCap Media have in common? They both ran their websites on their own, custom-built, content management system (and continue to do so in their new corporate guises).

Virgin Radio’s content management system, called simply the “CDS” (and you thought calling things after initials was just a BBC thing), started development in 2002. It’s entirely home-grown, written in PHP mostly by Duncan Amey, the clever software engineer there. It’s developed and designed to ensure that database calls are kept to a minimum on the live site; and the CDS writes mostly flat pages to the webserver. It was developed to work together with the playout system and various other tools within the radio station. Some of it managed to parse flat output from other systems.

GCap’s content management system is called “Gusto”. Started in around 2005, I’d guess, it’s written in Django, a high-level Python framework – and, again, much of it is homegrown, though they contributed heavily back to the Django project, partially due to Simon Willison’s hard work. Once more, it’s specifically written for the needs of a radio station, as I understand it (though I’ve not seen it working behind the scenes).

(added): Gusto was actually started in mid 2007. Prior to Gusto awas IKE (Ike Knows Everything), which was a GWR Group CMS, doing websites, DLS and SMS as well.

Oh, and the BBC has its own, too – IPS (which they’re phasing out), and a host of others.

So, if you’re starting from scratch, writing a complex radio station website – should you do as they did, and write your own website content management system?

It might surprise you to learn that there’s one major-market radio station which is not using its own complicated code – or buying a CMS in from companies like MediaSpan. Instead, they’ve used free tools available on the web to completely reengineer how they do their website – moving away from their own tools, and the headache of keeping them going, to using open-source tools that hundreds of people are writing.

And, thinking about it: why would you want to run a membership, “VIP”, service, when you’ve got Facebook Connect there? Why subject your users with the hassle of signing into yet another service – and your web designers and developers with the hassle of writing the system behind it – when you could do the job just as effectively in Facebook, Twitter, or a variety of systems that your listeners will probably already be signed up to?

At this year’s Radio At The Edge – tickets available now – you can find out who that radio station is – and why using open tools to create your website (and, come to that, open content to add to it) is getting more and more important.

After all: why concentrate on the tech, when you can concentrate on the content?

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