CoPress

Daniel asked me to write up some thoughts about internal CMS development after we recently went through the process here in Spokane. For years, we’d been publishing on a fairly cluttered newspaper site running ASP and SQL Server. We were (and are) a pretty small staff, but in December we relaunched our main news site powered by Django ponies. I’ll share a bit about our development process – if you’re considering something similar, maybe you’ll find this helpful.

Where We Began: Decisions Before Coding

Our project started with a pretty traditional task force, assigned to explore and present options to the executives at our company. We had put off a site redesign for quite a while, knowing that while we might be able to dress up an ASP site in prettier templates, that wouldn’t give us the security we needed, or a platform capable of features that readers have come to expect. That required a complete technology overhaul. We had a few “musts” in mind, things like:

• Pretty URLs, and the SEO that comes with them. No more story.asp?ID=23984.
• The ability to do custom data design and specialized apps. The traditional newspaper content types – stories, videos, blog posts, etc. – don’t cover all the fun stuff (like pet names databases) or all the serious stuff (like a news report on diploma mill recipients)
• Getting into a development framework with an active user base. (Ever tried to find troubleshooting help on your ASP-powered image uploader? Good luck)

And so on. I’m sure our list of “musts” looked pretty much like yours would. We investigated a couple mass-market CMS options, but didn’t find any that were even close to providing the flexibility we wanted. (Not to mention, pbcs.dll does not a pretty URL make.) That left us with open-source systems, and I was pretty sure from the start that we’d end up wanting to go Django. For any Drupal fans out there, we certainly thought it was a good option – Django’s strengths just matched up with ours in a better way. It more than answered our needs.
Read more →

Host: Adam Hemphill

Guests: Anthony Pesce, Miles Skorpen, Joseph Agreda, Max Cutler, Justin Myers, Rick Martinez, David Estes

Summary: Excerpts from a roundtable discussion among student developers from across the country regarding Django-based content management systems (and a Ruby On Rails system from FIUSM). The entire conversation is available as a MP3 download.

Links:

• Populous Project
• Ochs
• Nameless CMS
• The Maneater
• Gazjango

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

Got feedback or ideas for an upcoming podcast? Let us know!

Standard Podcast [ 22:49 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (113)

The Whit of Rowan University launched its new Web site this week, becoming the first (dare I say inaugural?) publication online in the CoPress beta hosting program.

Led by the tireless efforts of Miles Skorpen, we helped the student paper jump from the College Media Network (College Publisher) to an independent site running WordPress on our server.

“I’m more than satisfied with the end result,” says Whit Web Editor Emily Kostic. The staff was initially hesitant about the switch, but now, according to Kostic, “Everyone is in love with the new site.”

“I like how it was collaborative with Miles, ensuring that we had a say in what the site would look and feel like,” she added.

Here’s a rundown of the what it took.

Archives. Years of articles from The Whit’s archives were imported, using files provided by CMN. Such transfers of legacy data can be an onerous task, and this one took longer we than expected. But along the way, Miles wrote a script to automate the migration as much as possible, smoothing the trail we hope for future moves.

Look. The Whit’s new design is based on a Revolution Two theme, for an un-bloggish layout. Designer Brian Gardner has unfortunately decided to start charging for these “premium” themes again, just two months after announcing he was offering them for free. We at CoPress were thoroughly unimpressed with the Revolution templates after working underneath the hood. With a growing market of paid themes — see WP Remix and WooThemes, among many others — we’d be hesitant to recommend Revolution.

Backend. WordPress, flexible though it may be, and becoming more like a full-fledged CMS in recent versions, is still basically blogging software out of the box. It takes a slate of plugins and a good bit of tweaking to fit the dynamic needs of a collegiate newspaper. Some inelegant workarounds are required. We’re hoping that adaptation can be made much more efficient.

Our work is not yet done. We’ll continue improving and polishing the Whit’s site. And learning how college newsrooms can better utilize open-source tools like WordPress.

Questions and critiques, as always, are welcome.

Host(s): Bryan Murley, Daniel Bachhuber

Guest(s): Rick Martinez

Summary: A discussion about the development of FIUSM.com‘s content management system built on Ruby on Rails, Nameless CMS.

Links

• FIUSM.com
• Ruby on Rails
• Nameless CMS

Up next

Scott Karp of Publish2 on link journalism and how it might apply to student media.

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

Standard Podcast [ 24:07 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (123)

Host(s): Bryan Murley, Joey Baker, Daniel Bachhuber and David Estes

Guest(s): Anthony Pesce and Dharmishta Rood

Summary: A discussion about the development of the Populous Project – a Knight-funded college-specific content management system.

Links:

• Populous Project site

Up next: The relaunch of FIUSM.com with Rick Martinez

Standard Podcast [ 29:52 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (796)

The CoPress hosting plan is doomed to failure according to Dean Chen, lead developer at The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper.

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. Read more →

Welcome to the second podcast from CoPress. Each week, we’re going to be talking with student journalists, professional journalists, and others about technology, innovation, college media, and the way forward.

This week, Albert Sun, web editor for the Daily Pennsylvanian, talks about developing the new entertainment magazine web site 34st.com using Drupal.

Three of the plug-ins Albert metioned in the podcast:

• http://drupal.org/project/cck
• http://drupal.org/project/views
• http://drupal.org/project/imagefield

Have a topic you think we should cover in our next interview? Leave us a note in the comments!

Standard Podcast [ 14:50 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (717)

Check out this post on our wiki.

Since launching our new site in late August, The Miami Hurricane has not only used WordPress for our online content management but also to revamp our story workflow process.

It didn’t happen overnight but, by late September, all story editing was being done in the CMS. It’s a process I conceptualized with Editor in Chief Matthew Bunch and Webmaster Brian Schlansky (I advise The Hurricane as editor at large for online and multimedia).

What follows is a breakdown of our system. Enjoy!

Read more →

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.

I have the honor of writing the first official post for those of us here at coPress (the ‘About page’ and ‘Hello World’ non-withstanding). I’m a wordy guy, and I love to read myself write. But, there’s a lot to say.
I had originally intended this to be an end-all, be-all post about all things CMS and coPress related. I’ll spare you the endless scrolling for now, and break my thoughts up into several posts. I’ll try to summarize a lot of the things I’ve been saying within coPress and make an argument for UCLA’s Populous Project — which I’m very excited about.
To kick this off, and introduction to…

Content Management Systems

In becoming involved with this project, I’ve come to realize that people have varying levels of technical expertise (duh) and misconceptions about the world of web design. Let me clear the air a little bit and try to dispel some of the common fears and misconceptions I’ve been hearing.

Designers are to Developers…

When someone introduces themself as a ‘web designer,’ ask them if they’re a designer, or a developer.
Yankees, Mets. Coke, Pepsi. Bush, Logic (kidding). Designers, Developers. In every Web site ever created, there has been a struggle between code and design.
Designers want a site that looks … pretty. But they also worry about HMI, UI, and accessibility — there’s a science to that.
Developers are engineers and immersed in the science that is code. But, make no mistake: clean code is an art form.
Disclaimer: I’m a designer. I specialize in clean, minimalist design that is user driven. I hate to make compromises in design because the code is messy. I believe that design should drive code, not the other way around.

CMS

Content management systems are the new way of developing Web sites. They allow developers to do all of the coding work so that the Average Joe can login and add content to the site without knowing any HTML.
Let your fears be assuaged — any CMS that we develop will be as simple to use as any system you’re on now; quite probably easier — if we do our jobs right.
The plan is to be better than College Publisher: faster, easier to use, more modern and ad revenue sharing free. We can accomplish this relatively easily — CP set the bar pretty low.

All your old stuff

A lot of folks have rightly voiced fears about porting their old content over to a new CMS. Rest assured, this can be done.
Folks like College Publisher can’t deny you access to your own (copyrighted) data. There have been several schools that have successfully transitioned off College Publisher onto other platforms. Our CMS will make this process as painless as possible.

Opensource

Ever have a piece of software that does 90 percent of what you want, but just refuses to have that one feature that would make it a killer app? Maybe you’ve been dealing with a really annoying bug in the program for years, and just wish the darn manufacturer would fix it. Opensource is a deceptively simple solution to a common problem: sustainability.
By giving the code behind an program to anyone that wants it, open source ensures that there will be a community of developers fixing bugs and creating new features.
Yes, you’ll have to know code to contribute — but at least you can. That feature you always wanted? It’s a snap to find/hire someone for the few hours of work it takes to add that feature. It’s a lot easier than creating a new program from scratch.
By making our CMS open source, we can virtually guarantee that it will be supported as long as papers continue to use it.

We’re all good

Changing something as critical as your Web site is a huge step — with inherent risks. The important thing to take away from CoPress is that we’re aware of these risks and are will minimize them enough so you won’t have to worry about disaster.

To Come:

• The Pro-Easy: Why WordPress is not a sustainable solution and Django is
• Populous: Pre-alpha impressions
• CoPress.com: How we’ll make this a sustainable solution