Can WordPress solve our College Publisher woes?
For student newspaper Web sites, College Publisher is the big kahuna.
Most of the country’s collegiate publications use the service — more than 550, according to the MTV-owned company. It offers a content management system, prefab design templates and hosting, all free of charge. The other big selling point: It’s simplistic enough that no technical expertise is required.
It’s a good set-it-and-forget-it product. However, it’s not without its costs.
How do we dislike CP? Let me count the ways…
Large banners from national advertisers dominate the top and side of every page. Revenue sharing with papers for this ranges from nil to minuscule, if you’re lucky. Local ads can be added too, but the prime real estate belongs to CP.
Customization is a challenge, to put it mildly. That’s why CP sites look very similar in style and structure. Unfortunately, the standard isn’t a very good one — cluttered, outdated, clunky, often slow and hardly user-friendly.
If your publication is lucky enough to have a geek on staff, he or she will be limited in attempts to redesign, add new media or create outside-the-box features. Such efforts are either rendered impossible or made tedious. Though College Publisher is attempting to address this problem with a new version of its CMS, they’ve been behind the curve for years now.
It hasn’t been an open, adaptable system that allows students to truly innovate. You can’t open up the hood and fiddle around, or even replace the tires, because you don’t own the car. CP just lets you borrow it, in exchange for taking the profits from those gargantuan ads. That’s their business model, not necessarily a bad one for all customers, but inherently limiting.
So online college media lags behind, with sites staid and shallow, standing in stark contrast to the ever-evolving, ever more dynamic Web at large.
The WordPress alternative
These complaints have been oft-repeated. Yet the few other options that do exist are daunting to most editors, those poor souls already short on time, money, and internet know-how. So they make do with CP for now.
However, several adventurous papers have recently turned to WordPress as an alternative. The popular open-source blogging software runs millions of blogs, including this one. It is endlessly customizable through a large number of themes and plugins offered by third parties.
Though not initially designed to be a full-fledged CMS, WordPress can be used as one with a little hacking. Both the Temple News and Miami Hurricane bought professional “premium” themes to do much of that work for them. You can read a report from Temple’s Sean Blanda on the process and get greater technical detail from Miami’s Brian Schlansky.
We’ll have more info on using WordPress for a college newspaper CMS in the days ahead.
What now?
WordPress is not alone. In the last few years, open-source CMSs have taken great leaps, making more power attainable and affordable to more people. Other quality tools we’re looking at include ExpressionEngine, Drupal and Django, the last of which is a Python-based framework more than a CMS.
Yet, to varying extents, all require coders and Web designers to build a site, including WordPress. That’s something few college publications have, or at least have much of. CoPress is trying to bridge that gap.
But how? What do you think? What are your priorities for your Web site? What must a viable College Publisher alternative offer? Take our brief first survey or let us know in the comments.
Tags: CMS, College Publisher, Django, Drupal, Expression Engine, Miami Hurricane, Python, questions, Temple News, WordPress
Sep 30, 2008
Way to lay it out, my friend. I think this discussion of WordPress vs. Django is about to get very interesting…
Oct 01, 2008
Yes WP is a valid alternative. But only with certain “magazine” style themes. and also with some back end tweaking depending on your scale and content needs. i would say its better even if you need to pay for some programming because you get more customization and monitization options. overall more control.
Oct 01, 2008
Damnit, I just deleted the entire comment I was writing by accident.
However, the gist of it was that you don’t need a Geek on staff if you’re going with a lot of the popular CMS options. WordPress and ExpressionEngine both have a ton of firms and people ready to design your site the way you need it. EE has a professionals network, whereas with WP you just need to Google a bit.
Yes, WP is easier for the non-tech to use, but it’s also limiting in that way. A lot of stuff you might want to do would require either finding a pre-built plugin, or hacking PHP directly. The latter is not a fun option for the non-tech crowd.
I also think that WP is harder to build a solid news site with. Even the Hurricane’s site looks more like a blog, with all of the posts being in chronological order. However, you can use custom fields in WP, meaning that you could weight posts according to their importance.
In EE, accomplishing that is much easier.
@David I don’t think you can compare WP and Django. WP is a blog-centric CMS, Django is a framework that lets you create database-driven Web apps of all types rapidly. There are no templates to help you out, and you’re stuck either hacking Django’s admin interface to include WYSIWYG and whatever else you want, or rolling your own.
I love Django, but writing a CMS in Django is a lot different than taking a CMS and customizing it to your needs. You also have the benefit of an entire community using the same CMS as you, and most likely running into the same sorts of issues.
Oct 01, 2008
Just wanted to add that everyone who’s had to use Alligator Blogs, the new EE site I set up, has said that the admin interface is a breath of fresh air compared to our old one. Our blogs editor took to it very naturally, and even discovered a feature I never noticed, which was the ability to back-date posts (we were importing old blog posts from the other system into Sports).
Oct 02, 2008
involving people in creating something together, also brings about experience of design. I feel that involving stakeholders in futures exploration or envisioning, in field research, in prototyping, in storyboarding/storytelling, etc. brings about a certain click, facilitating the opening up of minds and other, richer channels of communication. How do you look at the relationship between the design of experiences and the experience of design?
Oct 02, 2008
[...] new post on the CoPress site debates the merits of College Publisher and Wordpress as a CMS for a college news [...]
Oct 02, 2008
Not to get entirely off topic, do you think porting WordPress would be an option? I’ve heard great things about Expression Engine all along, but my greatest fear is that it is not open source. I think everything we do an build should be based off the GPL.
Also, I’d love to see the backend of something built with Django. We should get a hookup.
Oct 02, 2008
I think it’s fair to say College Publisher needs to be absolutely replaced. There’s no excuse anymore for college papers not to take advantage of free alternatives that let them keep all of their money and free up ad space in the actual paper.
Papers could even use Blogger with a ported Wordpress theme, so it’s time.
Oct 05, 2008
Some good thoughts here.
Yes, @jakrose you’re right, WP requires the right theme and plugins to make it an adequate CMS for us. That’s something this project could provide. Question is – with those adjustments to the base install, how could it be packaged so that ordinary users can install it? What about maintenance?
I agree largely with Schwanksta on EE. I use it and am a fan. Great flexibility, would be much easier to mold to whatever we want. Yet being less of an end-user product, it’ll take more work. But we get to do it. More molding, less hacking?
Daniel – EE opens much of its code and allows anyone to develop extensions, which can be released freely under any license. So no, we can’t give ExpressionEngine away for free, but anything we build for it can be GPL or whatever.
For our current purposes, I think building from scratch with Django or anything else is a bad plan. For speed’s sake, as existing products get us halfway there to start. But also for those pre-existing communities to help now and support of the core software long-term.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say we should run to use Blogger, but we don’t have to fulfill every ideal today. We just need something that works. Not in 2010. Now.
Oct 06, 2008
[...] get a face-lift soon, for a cleaner presentation. Look for more topical blogging, like the recent WordPress post, to come. If you want to hear minutia discussed, audio of the entire hour-plus conference is [...]
Oct 16, 2008
[...] Student media is debating the switch from College Publisher to WordPress. Might be a good professional move [...]
Mar 26, 2009
[...] get a face-lift soon, for a cleaner presentation. Look for more topical blogging, like the recent WordPress post, to come. If you want to hear minutia discussed, audio of most of the hour-plus conference is [...]