DailyMole.com First Look: The Deets Exclusive

Former CityPages editor, Steve Perry, announced on Almanac (Sep 7, New Media topic) that his new online media site has a name: The Daily Mole.

Paul Schmelzer followed up yesterday with a description of the placeholder at DailyMole.com.

The Dirt on Perry’s New Site — And More

The site, which goes into beta testing late this week, will be called The Daily Mole. An animation at the placeholder site features a mole grubbing in the dirt, chomping local luminaries as it goes along, from David Strom and Al Franken to Katherine Kersten, Brother Ali, and Paul Westerberg.

But if you want a behind the scenes look at what The Daily Mole is going to look like, you’ll only get that at The Deets.

Here is the placeholder:

Here is the homepage of the beta site:

Below is a shot of the Talk section, which appears to be built for audience participation. The post shown, LOL Polz, appears to be an audience participation caption contest poking fun at local politicians.

There has been some speculation about what type of content management system would be used for the site. Knowing that the site plans on engaging the site’s audience, a blogging platform seemed like a fair assumption.

Looking at the About page of the site, it seems pretty darn clear that the platform chosen was WordPress – a popular free open source blogging platform:

Find more of the back story on the DailyMole at Minnesota Monitor.

Editorial: It’s possible that WordPress isn’t the final CMS for the news site (update: it’s been confirmed in the comments that it will be at launch), but assuming it is, I think it’s a great choice based on what I’ve read about the goals for the site. WordPress makes it very easy to add authors, moderate comments, promote commenters to author status, add additional functionality through plugins (for example, The Deets runs on WordPress and has plug-ins for comment previews, related posts, video embedding, polls, RSS syndication, Flickr integration, and comment subscriptions, to name a few). This could all be built from scratch, but why bother when it’s already been done?

Update: Anonymous sources are suggesting that this may not be the final design for launch. Feel free to share your opinions or knowledge in the comments.

Developing . . .