CoPress

First, a bit of history. CoPress started in August 2008 when I wrote a post calling for an open source alternative to the dominant proprietary content management system in the student media market. Greg Linch and I had our first conversation right before my flight down to San Francisco for WordCamp 08, and the discussion snowballed from there. Originally, my goal was to move the Oregon Daily Emerald to an open source, flexible content management system that I could hack at and experiment with. The role of CoPress was to provide a network of web developers at student news organizations that I could collaborate and share ideas with, as well as be a resource for whomever came after me.

This idea for a distributed network of support is still a very real dream for us but we soon realized, thanks to Bryan Murley, that there were intermediate steps we needed to cover first. Most importantly, this included supporting student news organizations with a turnkey hosting solution they could experiment with. We started our Managed Hosting program in January 2009 and launched our first site, The Whit, shortly after that.

Since then, we’ve migrated and launched more than 35 WordPress-powered websites, including The Red and Black, the UWM Post, and the QU Chronicle in the past week. It’s a learning experience for us as much as it is for the news organizations with which we work. For instance, as the largest site we’ve worked with thus far, The Red and Black has offered unique performance challenges that I had the fortune to work on during my wifi-enabled flight back from our team meetup in Philly this weekend.

As a part of our goal to increase the number of opportunities for collaboration and knowledge-sharing in 2009, we also held regular workshops throughout the summer and fall, published reports from the field on our blog, started development on the Edit Flow Project, and connected with the network at conferences including BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly and ACP/CMA in Austin.

We’re committed to executing our vision for the future of journalism. Our original philosophy for hosting and support, though, involved a one-size-fits-all solution that we’ve come to realize isn’t the best long-term approach to scaling our efforts. As such, we’ve relaunched our hosting and support plan again (we did it once in August too) with four tiers of service: basic, standard, full, and premium. Based on our experiences of the last year, we think the offerings better reflect the needs of different types and sizes of publications; for some, it’s fine if theme changes are made on the production site whereas others should have a development sandbox and deployment process. The new prices will be applicable to all of our new sign-ups, and existing publications will be guaranteed their current prices through the end of their invoice plus three months.

For the spring and into the summer, our goal is to ramp up the collaboration opportunities. That’s the true value of having a well-connected network of student webmasters and developers.

Let’s do it.