CoPress

Today — four months after first learning about CoPress through Twitter —  the Mustang Daily launched its new WordPress site, hosted and supported by CoPress. The Mustang Daily, a 2008 Online Pacemaker Winner and 2009 Pacemaker Finalist, had been with College Publisher since 2006.

Website Design

We went with the Gazette Edition from WooThemes because it gave us all the basic capabilities we were looking for:

• Prominent ads
• Wigetized sidebar
• Slick, rotating slideshow
• Auto-generated thumbnails

Advertising

During a time when revenue is falling, having full control over priority ad space is a must. We have a top banner (468 x 60 pixels), a sidebar ad (300 x 250 pixels) and up to four square ads on the lower sidebar (125 x 125 pixels).

We installed a WordPress plugin that allows for a “page peel” style advertisement in the top corner of the site. Although probably annoying to some, people like playing with it.

Plugins Used

The following plugins give us functionality that College Publisher would never allow for (or at least not easily).

Twitter Tools lets us easily post new articles and tweets straight from the admin end of WordPress. Why this is great: We don’t have to give every reporter the Twitter password and it streamlines the process of tweeting a new article. Posting links to articles is acceptable in moderation and when it’s supplemented with plenty of converstaion.

WP-Touch generates a mobile version of our site. If you don’t have a smart phone, you might not care, but this fall at Cal Poly, six hundred students on campus used iPhones — 500 more than in the spring, according to Ryan Matteson, the university’s technical security officer. My point: mobile is on the rise.

Another mobile plugin we’re excited about is for the non-smart phone users who want to get SMS updates. SMS Text Message is a plug we’re excited about, but have yet to use. It allows users to subscribe for text message alerts and lets us send out those alerts from the dashboard.

We’re using the Add to Any plugin for users to share our content over any social network. Although Share This is more widely recognizing for sharing, I chose Add to Any because it lets us customize the look of the button.

Structural Changes to the Daily

On a CICM post, I briefly mentioned the structural changes that came with the switch. To elaborate, this is how our workflow will function from here on out:

• Reporters save their articles as a WordPress draft (instead of e-mailing articles to editors)
• The reporter contacts copy editors when the article is in the CMS, copy editors will edit from the newroom or home (wherever they happen to be)
• We’ve hired an additional copy editor and switched up the shifts so there is always a copy editor on-call during the day
• There is an ongoing Google Spreadsheet of most recent articles posted. After editing the article, the copy editor signs off on the article on the spreadsheet
• The third editor to read over the story pushes “publish” if they think it’s ready. If it still needs work, it can go through the process again
• In the evening, designers pull already-edited articles from WordPress for page layout

The delay time between when a reporter writes the article and the editor posts it is about four hours. Right now, it’s not to efficient because our reporters are new (and therefore their articles need much editing) and the workflow is still slow. It will only get better from here.

The Back End

The hierarchy is broken down as such:

• Three administrators (not including CoPress) who have full access to all features
• About ten editors who can publish articles
• Ten contributors (reporters) who can save drafts, but not publish

New Features

Although we certainly didn’t need WordPress to implement the following new features to our website, having WordPress has made it way easier to execute these ideas we’ve had:

• Crime map: WordPress pages make adding new, easily-accessible features very easy. Within a few minutes, we were able to throw together a Google Map of the police log that we plan to update daily.
• Hot topics: We’ve always wanted to re-ignite an old feature called “What’s the Buzz?” but creating and maintaining pages was always a headache. Again, within minutes we were able to generate pages around controversial issues on our campus. Eventually, we’ll have a wiki to supplement each topic.

What’s Next?

Now that the process of posting is more streamlined (or, it’s getting there), the goal is to produce better multimedia. My efforts can be focused on training reporters one-on-one instead of copying and pasting articles at the end of the night.