Recent examples:

- This http://www.nytimes.com/projects/nyctestscores/ was a day of development from scratch: Me, Rob from the CAR team, and Matt Ericson did an hour or two of front-end touchup. It’s ugly, and kinda not the greatest, but it’s certainly comparable to anything you get out of the box with Caspio.
We are in the process of making a Rails plugin out of this that will allow you to point to a database table, and generate the framework of a search/master/details site. (And not have your data invisible to Google…)

- We’ve turned our Clinton documents site (http://politics.nytimes.com/clinton-schedules) into a Rails plugin. To generate something like this (http://www.nytimes.com/cityroom/documents/koranteng) from a pdf takes a few minutes. Next version will be completely SEO friendly and will include inline, page-level annotation, kind of similar to the way the Django book does comments.

- This (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/06/02/nyregion/GRAPHIC_CRANE_VIOLATIONS.html) is a really super-simple Google map we threw together on deadline after the crane collapse. Again, not the most compelling thing in the world, but we’re almost done converting this into a basic Rails plugin that will allow you to generate a much better version of this in minutes.

All of these plugins took some initial work, but will give us infinitely more freedom and flexibility than Caspio ever will. And, I won’t be locked into their proprietary software.

For what it’s worth, we’re considering very seriously releasing the document viewer and possibly the other two as open source software, for non-commercial use (sorry, caspio!) if people think they would use them.

Wynn hits the nail on the head with his thought that “organizations aren’t even considering what they want out of Caspio when they sign up.”

I haven’t been to one, but I imagine Caspio’s sessions at IRE and NICAR are slick. I guess a couple of our folks went to them and came back all psyched about using Caspio.

Which brings to my point about Caspio: It’s a great tool for getting simple data online quickly. It’s especially great for taking the load off programmers/designers/car people/whatever, especially if you’re looking to get cheap clicks.

But the idea that Caspio doesn’t require programming just isn’t true. If you want to do anything beyond what comes out of the box, you gotta use programming to adapt it…whether it’s JS for mapping or whatever.

Why not take the time it would take you to learn Caspio’s ins and outs and learn Django/Ruby on Rails?

At $8/mo./datapage, there are other options available. I think organizations aren’t even considering what they want out of Caspio when they sign up. And that’s causing them to overlook other better, cheaper solutions.

Having ten datasets up will cost around $1000 every year. If all a news org needs is a search box/results container, that money could be funneled toward an Elancer who could build a tool to do just that. If you want to throw in maps, add it to the job description — it’s definitely doable.

If you want to try pushing Caspio to the limits, then you have to be willing to hack around, anyway. Use the cash investment to send a curious staffer to a PHP class at a community college, or shoot them off to the Django classes at IRE/NICAR.

I guess what bothers me most about Caspio is that its business plan is preying on a short-sighted systemic mistake endemic at newspapers. It’s ludicrous that money — which could go towards actual journalism — has to be diverted to build a workaround over a purely internal problem.