• Alex Klein (@alexklein), online editor
• Dean Chen (@deanchen), lead developer
• Chase Olivieri (@chasefoto), multimedia editor

As you might have seen, Alex wrote a blog post for CoPress about their recent switch from College Publisher to Drupal. Here’s a summary of what we discussed in the podcast:

• Why they chose Drupal
• How the switch went
• How they’re building a Web staff
• Multimedia
• New commenting policy and their comment system

Listen in!

• The New York Times is leveraging the communication skills of their journalists in an entirely new way: by having them teach. It’s a first-time experiment for the publication that hints at the importance of area expertise for the 21st century journalist. (tks Brian Manzullo)
• Need ideas for reinventing your J school this fall? Suzanne Yada has your back. The best, most pragmatic idea, in my opinion, is hosting a BarCamp. Make it happen.
• In the forum, I’ve released the 0.1 version of a plugin for properly redirecting your old College Publisher URLs to your new WordPress website. It should work with both College Publisher 4 and College Publisher 5 URLs, although the caveat is that I haven’t tested it fully yet, and requires that your old article IDs are stored somewhere in the database (or that they are your new post IDs). Also, Andrew Robinson of the College Heights Herald has done a bit of research into the best plugin for integrating Facebook Connect into your website.
• Rebooting the News, Jay Rosen and Dave Winer’s podcast loved by everyone (or Joey, Greg, and I at least), had Zach Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab on as a guest this past week. Zach presents a thoughtful, well-informed perspective on the Associated Press’ DRM announcement that caught me completely by surprise, and Jay and Dave conclude the episode with a conversation about the type of information news stories traditionally lack that would actually make the reporting more useful.

Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.

The database they gave us contained almost 12,000 entries and was much to big to be handled by a program like Excel or even Access. I’m telling you right now: don’t even try. What you should do is dump the entire CSV into a MySQL database. I found the easiest way to do it was with Navicat MySQL. They offer a free trial. If you have problems, make sure you have enabled database access for your IP address. The easiest way to drop data in is to convert the CSV to an Excel file and then it will go right in using Navicat. Otherwise you might have serious problems with special characters and such. Also, I had a problem with a few spam entries (from where, I wonder?) that broke the database, but I took those out in Excel.

If manual steps aren’t your thing, then the CP Import plugin released by John Luetke could be the ticket. If you convert your College Publisher export files from CSV to XLS, it will import each entry into WordPress through the WordPress API. He reported that it took about 30 minutes to import about 50 MB of pure text for The Marquette Tribune‘s coming website. It will also reportedly add your related media as galleries attached to a post. CoPress is currently converting databases with a Python script but, if it turns out to work well, this might compel us to switch.

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.

Bloggers are the anti-journalist.

Or at least that was the thinking at newspapers several years ago. Now that blogging has gained at least tacit acceptance among “true” journalists, newsrooms are encountering the very two same problems that have plagued bloggers since the dawn of… blogging: consistently producing good content, and getting that content the exposure it deserves.

The good news, however, is that creating content comes relatively easy for journalists who are already used to having to meet a daily deadline. Once they accept the idea that a blog can be true journalism, they can adapt it as a less formal news article, a summary of their notes, sharing of a pitch that didn’t work out, a conversation with their readers, a series of relevant thoughts, or whatever gets ‘em blogging; most journalists seem to take to the new tool with gusto.

Now, some strategies for getting readers engaged.

Look at me! Please?

Part of the problem with blogs is that they have developed a stigma among the public — very similar to the way journalists used to feel. Therefore, getting your audience to click to a new area of your site that doesn’t necessarily have the latest “news” can be a challenge.

Case in point: at The Daily Orange, we’ve recently relaunched our Sports Blog network. The sports department has not only taken to the whole blogging experience, but they’ve really embraced the platform as a way of publishing a ton fantastic content that just does not fit into normal news articles. See this great video post example.

The issue here is that the blog network receives relatively few visits when compared to the main site. It also suffers heavily in the search rankings because it doesn’t have the Google juice of dailyorange.com.

Possible Solutions

What follows is a summary list of ideas that we’ve been brainstorming at The Daily Orange for getting our content noticed online. I’ve expanded it a bit to serve a general purpose audience.

Write for your niche audience. Don’t worry about entertaining the “average” viewer. Blogs are for the folk who want to know all there is to know about a singular topic. It is important to include your personal voice. The occasional post to let your readers see a “behind the scenes” view generates a lot of loyalty.

College Publisher users will note that there is no blogging system built into the platform. The best way (read: only way) to make up for this is to run a separate blogging platform. The problem with this is that, as a separate website, you loose all the previously mentioned Google Juice that your main site has gained. There are ways to help with this: 

• Link to the blog in the main navigation bar of the College Publisher site
• Put a tease for the blog (including links to the most recent posts) on the front page of the main website (this can easily be done with a widget)
• Link back to the main site on the blog
• Mention relevant blog articles in main news articles (with links, of course!)

Adopt Facebook. Love it or hate it, Facebook is the best platform to reach college students online. Positive steps include:

• Start a Facebook Page for your blog or news organization, and be sure the videos and blog posts auto-post to that page
• Have someone in charge of that page! You can rotate the responsibility if you like, but just as it’s important for your blog to have constant content so that it feels live, your Facebook page needs to have the same tender lovin’ care. All it takes is getting the status update changed a few times a week, or just sending out a message every week pointing people to a good blog post
• Be sure that all your relevant content reposts to your Facebook Page. This includes blog posts, videos and news articles. It’s also a good idea to link to content that you don’t generate. (Do what you do best, link to the rest.)
• Send out messages to your fans. Topics could include: a contest to ask for photos of some theme of the week (mid-terms, craziest fan costume, etc). Promise to run the top photo on the blog and in the print edition. You can also send out breaking news alerts via Facebook; the truth is that you’ll probably get more viewers on Facebook than on your main site.

Get on Twitter. If your newsroom is low on Twitter acceptance scale, (we’re at stage 1 at The Daily Orange), believe me when I tell you that will not, and can’t last. Twitter has proven on three separate occasions (Mumbai, Plane crash in Denver, Plane crash in the Hudson) that it’s a valuable news source. Welcome to the future.

More importantly, Twitter is a hot-bed of early adopters right now. Want to get noticed? Want Poynter,Romenesko, CICM, and others to recognize your work? Twitter is a great medium for that.

Twitter is much like your Facebook profile: it must be personable. This takes someone deciding to truly use the tool. Shoveling links on to it, is poor form, and really doesn’t encourage people to follow. @latimes and @missoulianphoto do a fantastic job of using Twitter. Check ‘em out if you wanna see how it’s done.

If you don’t want to manage accounts at Twitter and Facebook and [enter social network site here] check out Ping.fm. They can help make a lot of the status updating automatic.

You’ve got great content, now be great bloggers. No matter how you feel about it as a medium, blogging is going be here for quite sometime, and it’s got it’s own rules and culture associated with it.

Linking is key.

I’ll go ahead and write that again so that you don’t miss it:

Linking is key.

You’ve got to fill up the glass of Google Juice with links. Bloggers figured this out a long time ago, it’s why we’ve got things like blogrolls and Technorati. Some of the best ways of getting noticed are to start commenting on other related blogs. Say something relevant (“nice post” doesn’t count) and perhaps point them back to one of your own blog posts.

If your local city paper covers the same content, leaving a comment there can make the local community aware of the fact that you even exist.

Generating a conversation between blogs is beneficial for both parties, and serves the audience by inciting conversation. It’s a win for all involved (not to mention, good journalism).

credit: New York Times

Visuals are not optional. People like pretty pictures. If your blog is pure text, you stand the risk of looking very user-unfriendly. You’ve got a photo department – use ‘em.

Oh, and shooting video is cool too. A 3 minute recording of two reporters wrapping up a sporting event is easy, it’s something they do anyway, and will give a ‘behind the scenes view’ that your viewers will enjoy.

Ideas?

This has by no means been a comprehensive list of ways to get your content noticed, but at 1,200 words, I figure we’d better call it quits. If however, you’ve got a strategy you’ve used to get your blog readership up, please share in the comments.

edited by: Daniel Bachhuber

update: Feb 7, 2009: added iBlade image.

In an e-mail forwarded to the CoPress Googe Group, Dean wrote: (emphasis added)

I don’t like the idea of sharing a server with other papers, the primary reason being that if another site receives record traffic the response time of our site will suffer as an result. The specifications for the server hosting all the virtual servers is actually lower than what I was planning for our site only. To put it in perspective, the desktop in my dorm is much better configured than that server.

Their hosting plan also seems to be geared towards wordpress, which i much less demanding resource wise than drupal.

After receiving so much good press lately, it sure is refreshing to have someone take us to task on a technical issue — something that we’re supposed to be teaching other people about.

Dean makes some good points and got the CoPress team talking on New Year’s Eve. We’ve realized that there are several things that our organization, which strives for transparency, hasn’t made entirely clear.

We’re in beta

CoPress should have emphasized that our hosting plans our in a beta stage right now. We do have the server capacity to host three to five college news organizations and we will be capping our initial service there.

Yes, part of the reason we are doing that is because we don’t think that server can handle much more. Yes, it is possible that our server might not be able to handle even the relatively small number of organizations.

That’s why we’re in beta. That’s why we’re going with LiquidWeb, which will allow us to expand our server capacity almost instantly to deal with problems if/when they appear.

With all due respect to Dean’s dorm computer, LiquidWeb servers offer enough bandwidth to allow roughly 1.2 million visitors a month to a newspaper website. We think that’s plenty to start with.

CoPress isn’t trying to host the world, but we’re going to give a solid start to a few folks who sign up with us. If we become popular, we’ll be expanding our plans to more news organizations and thus increasing our server capacity.

We are equal opportunity CMS users

CoPress is currently focusing on WordPress-based solutions, but we’re not exclusive. As a matter of fact, we’re not in anyway convinced that WordPress is the long-term solution. It is, however, the best solution that we’ve seen that can be deployed now, and that is valuable for those who want a more dynamic site.

We’ve taken on a long-term project to evaluate many different CMS solutions available (there are several we’re excited about), but our priority to help organizations using College Publisher or other less-than-desireable platforms as soon as possible. WordPress offers a good, workable solution that does much of what we’d like.

If you’d rather host a Drupal, Django, Ruby on Rails, CakePHP or any other sort of site on our servers, please let us know! We’re not making any money off of our hosting — we just want to help you host your own site. It’s up to you what CMS you want to use.

CoPress = easy

Alex Klein, The Chronicle’s editor for new media, and the gentleman who forwarded Dean’s e-mail, said he’s a little disappointed with their progress developing a Drupal-based CMS.

Their project has a lot of support from the school, including a $100,000 budget (there’s politics associated with that number, but according to Alex it’s probably still there). Yet, despite the large budget and institutional support, and a working mockup of their new site, Duke’s nine-month project still hasn’t launched.

This is where CoPress can help!

We’re here to help you avoid these problems. We’ve designed our hosting to be about getting your paper online as quickly as possible on a platform that works.

We’re as transparent as Windows isn’t

(Pardon the geek humor in the subhead.) Here’s the point: we don’t want to make money. Our motivation is based on the idea that the more college media outlets that keep pace with the “new media” evolution, the better off we’ll all be.

Our hosting plan is just an extension of this philosophy. It seems to us CoPress folks that many schools have not been able to adapt to the Internet quickly due to a range of technical barriers.

We’re here to remove those hurdles.

Now.

Keep it coming

We really, really appreciate any and all feedback. The more honest the better. Keep it coming and we’ll keep using it.

What Dean’s criticisms pointed out to us it that

• We need to make it clear that we’re going to be taking just a few schools on our servers to start. We’re not trying to host the world (yet) but we think speed and reliability are critical, so rest assured, we’ll do our best to keep the servers at full speed.
• We think WordPres is a pretty darn good solution, but we know there are others out there. We’ll continue to look at them as they are developed. But if you want a site up quickly, WordPress is a great solution that is ready now.
• We need to step up our efforts to prove to college media that there is a solution to your technical difficulties. We’ve got it ready to go and are more than willing to help you out. Mostly because we’re hoping that you’ll jump far enough ahead to help us with the next big problem we all face.

CoPress is here to advocate for college media. One of the ways that we can do that is offering cheap, well supported, easy hosting. We’re still working on other avenues of support. Look to us to be the community that supports college media.

edited by Greg Linch

Update

Jan 1 14:36 PST — Link to The Chronicle test site removed per their request. Apparently, there was some miscommunication on that link being made public.

In the process of writing a blog post, Emily was hoping for someone with good knowledge of our project to explain to her the benefits of CoPress versus College Publisher. This post is my response.

Before I being outlining some of our organization’s tenets, however, I must address the potential danger of publicly replying to a query like this. I feel it is important to note that CoPress, despite being in a position to help sway some (or many) publications from using the services of College Publisher, is not explicitly aimed at doing so.

This is because our strategy and focus are fundamentally different. Above all, CoPress seeks to spread knowledge and easily accessible resources—whether or not we turn a profit. We feel it is safe to say that the same ideology is not held at College Publisher.

That aside, there are several reasons why CoPress will become an invaluable resource and, indeed, an eventual alternative to many systems currently being utilized by college media outlets. Not the least among these is the fact that our organization is, at this juncture, entirely student-driven.

In addition to offering the benefits of large-scale collaboration, this demonstrates and ensures that what we produce is done with passion and because of immediate need—with real-world scenarios in mind. We know what happens in college media because we are college media, and that is something that will continually strengthen as the network grows.

Similarly, a key component to the success of CoPress is the fact that everything we recommend, support and build is open source. Like students creating a network for college news organizations, open source software contributors make tools based on community need as well as personal passion.

They strive for continual growth as individuals and as part of a greater body, and in doing so they succeed in offering top-notch systems that rival and often overcome proprietary offerings. Open source software offers honesty and transparency, and we feel these are principles to live by as a progressive technological network.

Our belief in the open source ideology extends to the organization itself, thus we have made a concerted effort to create transparency within CoPress and its operations. This is possible because we lack a profit motivation, but moreover it encourages involvement at any and every level.

If someone is interested in involving themselves heavily with what we do, they are welcome; if one just wants to download a few plugins or find out how to get the most out of their College Publisher site, that’s OK too. CoPress wants to empower its constituents so that they can take control of their content, and organizational transparency goes a long way toward helping achieve this goal.

To briefly recap, the benefits of CoPress versus College Publisher are fourfold:

• No profit motivation
• Student-driven
• Open source
• Transparent

Simple as they may be, these few items will drive us to success. CoPress will prevail.

Do you want to get involved in a college media revolution? Get in touch via e-mail, our Google Group, Twitter, Facebook or any of our personal sites listed at right.

• Out of a total of 40 respondents, 10% identified as Publishers, 22.5% as Advisers, 27.5% as Online Editors/Webmasters, and 12.5% as Editor in Chiefs. With all of the other respondents included, it appears as though there is a wide spectrum of interest in the project.
• From that same batch of respondents, 27.5% are running College Publisher 4, 30% are running College Publisher 5, 10% are on WordPress, and 5% are on Drupal and something Django-flavored. College Publisher 4 scored the longest average deploy at 46.5 months.
• College Publisher 4 wins props for an automatic email version, ad management, and free tech support. There are suggestions to include a WYSIWYG editor, more design flexibility, and better multimedia management.
• WordPress received positive comments for its ease of use, plugin architecture, and comment management. It could use improvement in user management, backend customization, and an email edition (it currently requires a plugin).

Surprisingly, we received an entry stating that the paper used Dreamweaver to publish online. That, my friends, is dedication. My sympathy goes out to them. We’ll have a better solution for you soon enough.

Stay turned for stats such as the average number of developers, what languages they generally know, and CMS satisfaction. When the final report from the first survey is announced, so too will be our second, extended, even more amazing survey. We want to map out the technological workflow in your newsroom, as it will help us better understand what we’re working with (and feed you tips based on your current setup). Our second list of questions is comprehensive [Google Doc], but not yet complete. What do you think we’re missing? What do you want to learn about your community’s newsrooms? Please leave your feedback in the comments. Thanks for the support!

1. OK, you need two years and more money.

The first year, you can roll out a prototype school or three in the fall, a few more in the spring, and by the time the next summer rolls around, you have a service you’ve taken a school year to develop and improve before you bring it out on a larger scale.

To this, I partially agree. Currently, we’re asking for $70,000 from the Knight News Challenge and have a time scale of one year. I am opposed, at the moment, to asking for more money than I think is necessary. We have little understanding of what our costs will be (plus I’m sure they will scale over time) and the other applications in the garage that have asked for hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions, seem outlandish. I don’t want CoPress to be taken as an outlandish project.

For me, the one year qualifies the amount of time it will take to build part of something cool. CoPress, by no means, would be “finished” at the end of the first year. A year, though, sounds good for project scope and two years sounds too long.

Second, Ryan asks:

2. Other than it feeling warm and fuzzy, being based on open-source software and thus extensible, what’s the advantage to a student news org to use this instead of College Publisher? It’s free, and hosted, and if you ever get enough traffic, there’s a rev share on the national ads, right? How is this different. (I’d emphasize that it will be built on a platform that students can learn and adapt to their own needs, right?)

Boy, do I ever agree with you. As I’ve written before and before, “hackability” is critical. Student news organizations need to be working on an open source platform (or, bowing to Kevin, Ken, and Expression Engine, at least one with a plugin architecture) so that they have the ability to innovate as fast as they can. If anyone tries to argue with me that student news organizations don’t need digital distribution platforms they can innovate with, I won’t listen to you. The software College Publisher uses is, from all of my experiences, clunky, janky, and proprietary. We’ll win people over when we show them we have an easy-t-deploy, maintainable, and open and innovate platform to use. Hell, we’re friendly too.

At the moment, we’re not working on a national ad network, although ability to deploy ads will be functionality we provide in some capacity. I’ve heard rumors that there is another group working on the ad coop, however.

3. If you’re going to offer hosting, that’s going to cost money to maintain after a News Challenge grant would run out. What’s the business plan moving forward? And if you’re not going to offer hosting, what super-easy-to-install platform are you going to build the service on?

(WordPress or Drupal? Maybe… An Ellington-like Django-based CMS would actually be difficult, unless the student news orgs in question all have access to and control of their servers.)

The business plan is being worked out. Currently, we’re looking at a few different potential revenue streams:

• Fee for service: core CoPress developers offer technical support (database porting, site theming, temporary support if you don’t have an online editor for a term, etc.) for affordable rates.
• Flat rate fee for basic hosting, management, and support
• Grants and donation drives; foundation support
• Using The Point for raising money for plugins/add’l functionality; money raised will fund development by a web developer from the CoPress community

And it’s funny you ask about what platform we’re going to use. We’re in the process of researching the best one for our needs through our surveys and CMS audit. We’ve developed a list of what we think is critical functionality [Google Doc], and are in the process of researching how well Drupal, WordPress, Django, and/or Ruby on Rails could be hacked to fit these needs.

The million dollar question:

4. One of the winners last year is building a CMS/community network tool (plus some front-end print scheduling?) for student media. How is this different (hosting? other services?) and why is it (also) necessary?

Ryan, I think what you’re referring to is the Populous Project. We actually were talking with them about a month and a half ago, but haven’t heard anything since. What we’re doing is similar in the CMS sense (although we preferably won’t be building an entire CMS from scratch) but different in approach: we’re focusing on the technical ecosystem first. The medium to long term survival of CoPress requires a vibrant ecosystem of student Online Editors, etc. because they’re going to be the ones hacking away, educating and supporting each other, and advancing innovation in student news.

We’re working together in an open, transparent, and collaborative fashion, and that’s how we’re different.

Update: Oddly enough, the CoPress Google Group received an email from one of the Populous Project grantees a couple of hours ago in regards to why we shouldn’t consider Ruby on Rails. Hopefully we’ll hear more about their development soon.

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.