CoPress

Wikis for news organizations have been a buzzing topic recently as both a means of spreading news and passing down information to future editors. If creating a wiki is your summer plans, you’ll need to use software that meets your needs. 

MediaWiki

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This is perhaps the most well-known wiki software, especially because of its use by Wikipedia. It’s the open source software that is used on the CoPress wiki.

For your readers, this might be the functionality they’re most familiar with on the front end, but the complexity of the back end could intimidate and deter people from contributing.

If you put a helpful guide showing users how to edit the wiki and use the system’s formatting, they might be more likely to contribute. You have to be able to set up a MySQL database for your wiki, but it’s easily done. Setup is straight forward process that only takes a few minutes.
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Ok, I can’t get much hokier than that. Now is the time to get involved with CoPress! If you’d like to, we’ve started outlining a few golden paths to do so:

Contribute to the Blog

Redesign your website recently? Have an idea for the next killer student news application? Join the growing list of contributors to the CoPress Blog by pitching your idea to blog@copress.org. 

Connect in the Forum

When we relaunched the website a few weeks back, we installed a super powerful WordPress plugin called Simple:Press Forum. Our goal is to provide ways for our community, you guys, to connect on a regular basis about all things tech, student media, and journalism. At the moment, you can leave questions about WordPress, Django, and Drupal, and also participate in the weekly discussion group. This week Greg asks, “what ways are you generating revenue right now, how would you would evaluate your success and what would you like to do in the future?” We’d certainly enjoy having you weigh in. Read more →