George Mason University has an interesting community; with many of the students living off-campus or attending classes at one of the four satellite campuses, finding a way to reach out to and work with them can be difficult. We are always looking at what’s going on online to figure out which tools can help us best.

With that in mind, we’ve launched two websites, Mason Votes and onMason, in the past year and a half. We’re also in the midst of a second redesign of Connect2Mason, our convergence website which pulls content from all of our other student media outlets. We’ve also been pretty serious about expanding our social media presence to cover the needs of our diverse community.

onMason

At the beginning of this semester we launched a new site called onMason. During the last two years, we’ve noticed that a lot of students are out there, blogging, sending pictures from their phones to the web and creating websites. We felt that we were missing a serious opportunity to bring student-created media to the forefront because, even though we run searches, there’s always going to be a huge amount of stuff we’re going to miss.

We created onMason as the solution. The site is a WordPressMU platform for anyone with an @gmu.edu e-mail to sign up and get their own yoursite.onmason.com WordPress site. Each site comes with built-in mobile compatibility, SEO optimization, a Creative Commons license and a ton of themes and plug-ins. In addition, users can friend each other from the backend and set up their blog as a Facebook app. The user base has been growing very quickly, especially with professors using Scholarpress tools to run class sites. We’re in the midst of upgrading all our plug-ins so that they are 2.8 compatible, but we’re going to be re-rolling out a bunch of great features, including the ability to see a feed of all the blogs on the site and parse it down by tags.

There’s a lot of great potential there for crowd-sourcing events by having users blog about them and mark posts with a tag. We hope to provide the many Mason students already out there creating content and posting media with one home where they can get together, use the best tools, and provide their own view on Mason.

Right now, our focus is making sure everything is working, however, we’re looking at a number of monetization strategies for the site. We can set up ads that only display to non-users on every onmason.com site. We’ve also got the tools to set it up so certain plug-ins or expanded space is only available with a premium membership. Another possibility is providing local advertisers with the option to get their own sponsored  onMason site, I think that the opportunity to interact with students in a small hyper-local network like onMason would be a valuable one.

The advantage of this tool is that we can converge student-created content into our own. We also use onMason as a platform to host a number of our outlet sites, allowing our official front to join in with that community.

Mason Votes

Mason Votes was a community-backed project that the Office of Student Media launched for the national presidential election in 2008. The site allowed us to cover news with tools our office hadn’t used before. The original site was based on WordPress and had a static front page, in order to get the site up quickly. It integrated with Google Calendar, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and Delicious.

We were able to use a number of very cool tools over the course of the election. We covered the debates with CoverItLive chats and streamed live events using Livestream. We were able to make all our content, on both the site and social media, searchable using Lijit.

We found two great ways to pull traffic into the site. The first was through co-sponsoring community events. We worked with the College Republicans and College Democrats, various offices and other student groups to bring their events to the forefront in exchange for having a presence at those events. This came into play with live tweets and photos from student-run events, as well as with the live chats that played alongside video of the debates.

The second way we drove traffic was by putting everything under a Creative Commons license. Our articles were out on the web for people to use and our photographers photos were on Flickr and the people who used them (including Wikipedia) linked back to our presence.

The site continued to cover student and state elections and was moved to onMason and redesigned. It now has a Facebook app that lets people display the latest stories on their front page.

Connect2Mason

Last school year our Drupal-based convergence site Connect2Mason was redesigned and upgraded. The new site features a more dynamic front page and integrates in advertising and classifieds.

Connect2Mason’s role is to converge content from all the various student media outlets at GMU. They pull in podcasts from our radio station WGMU, video from our cable station MCN, text and photos from the student newspaper Broadside and enhance it with their own content and breaking news coverage.

Connect2Mason reporters use YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to post and broadcast content. The site is able to showcase the best of what student media produce.

We’re now redesigning the website with a more modern, less blog look. Our group is using Google Code to create requirements documents, track bugs and issues, and coordinate our activity. We’re making sure to do testing and really drill down on our requirements for version 3.0 of Connect2Mason.

Social Media

Our goal is to be the face of George Mason on social media, especially when it comes to Twitter, and we’re constantly garnering feedback and expanding our presence. My team runs 12 Twitter accounts along with their own personal identities. We have one for each of our major websites, news feeds for each  area where George Mason has a campus, and three accounts that pull from Twitter and other feeds to advertise local jobs. None of the job feed accounts would have even happened if it wasn’t for our regular interaction with our Twitter audience. At the end of the last school year I asked the people following the@FairfaxVANews account what they were interested in seeing us provide and a number of students looking towards graduation suggested the idea of a local job wire.

We feel like a big part of our role when it comes to Twitter is helping Mason students and faculty find each other, not just listen to us broadcast our own work. We created a Twitter directory that anyone could add to so that Mason users could list themselves and find each other. When the function came out, we created Twitter lists, so that people could follow all the orgs, offices, staff or students with a single click. We also monitor for mentions of GMU and engage interested high school students, professors and both grad and undergrad students. We also try to interact with the local community outside of the University’s boundaries, sending representatives to social media meetups and the recent DC Twestival.

We’ve found that this level of interaction allows us to push our content farther and get feedback. Not only that, but because we are out there talking to students, they sometimes come to us with tips that turn into new stories.

Overall tools

For Twitter, we’ve been using CoTweet and Seesmic Desktop to share access to the various Twitter accounts, follow mentions and engage our community.

The WPBook plugin allows any onMason user to make their site headlines a Facebook app.

We’re transitioning some of the older advertising over, but soon all of our graphic and text ads will be administrated by our OpenX ad server. OpenX provides a free ad server which we installed and run ourselves. It provides all the tools to set up and administrate ad campaigns on multiple sites.

Aram Zucker-Scharff is the Technology Manager in the Office of Student Media at George Mason University. He can be reached at azuckers@gmu.edu.

• 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!

• Columbia Daily Spectacle (UPDATED) – Details on what went down at the Columbia Spectator over last weekend. Frustrated with the leadership of the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor, the Online Editor decided to take the site offline until a list of demands had been met.
• WordPress 2.8.5: Hardening Release – Minor security updates including a fix for a Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently affecting a subset of users. You should probably upgrade as soon as possible.
• What does a mobile journalist need? – Paul Bradshaw streams a class on mobile journalism, and lists hardware, software, systems, and mindset required for mobile journalism. (tks Megan Taylor)
• How To Use Your Custom Yourls Shortener with Tweetie 2 – Simple tutorial on how to use your self-hosted URL shortener with Tweetie 2. Yourls is a slick piece of software for hosting your own URL shortener.
• Jonathan Pichot at the Campus Chronicle is looking for the best plugin for Facebook Connect and any tips for implementation.
• News Orgs Make Gradual Progress in Site Navigation, Use of Social Networks – Ken Sands walks through design considerations of recent changes to the Washington Post, Toronto Star, and Spokesman-Review. Ryan Pitts at the Spokesman-Review seems to be doing the most radical rethink of navigation; it would be interesting to know whether they’re tracking user interaction and iterating based on usage.
• Max Cutler and Robert Baskin have been doing a bit of work on Courant News today, including finishing up powerful search functionality I’ve gotten to take a peak at and building an “elegant way to vary site display based on User-Agent or other HTTP headers.”
• Announcing Managing News: A Pluggable News & Data Aggregator – The code is in open beta and available for download. The key selling point to this product seems to be that you can import data from multiple sources, run persistent searches across the incoming data, and visualize it on a map.

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

That all changed when we had a few important things happen at around the same time in early 2008. First, our then-editor, David Graham, recognized the need for a new Web presence. Midway through his editorship, I cold-emailed David to tell him that I really wanted to help The Chronicle make a new website. The next year’s editor, Chelsea Allison, immediately went to bat for us financially and logistically, and a task force of sorts was hatched — including a few top editors, some nerdy staff members and several developers we had managed to recruit.

To make short a 22-month long story, we ended up deciding after lots of debate and proposal reviews that we’d build our new site in-house — even with a generous Board of Directors ready to pay an outside firm. We’re glad we made that call because it was a completely unique learning experience for dozens of us, it ended up saving a ton of money at an important time and we made a Web site of which we and our readers can be proud. We released the site on Monday, Sept. 28, 2009.

Looking back at the last two years’ worth of work on this project, it’s becoming clearer to me what helped us along the way. I’m not going to go into why we made this design decision or use that video hosting service because I don’t think that will be as interesting or valuable as the following battle-tested strategies and tendencies. It’s these more general observations that will keep you on the right trajectory, in my opinion.

In short: if you’re just starting out, worry about planning now and pixel widths later. Here is some advice I hope you’ll take to heart:

Having a diverse advisory group is key

As I mentioned before, we had a task force composed of people from many areas of The Chronicle. Members included that year’s Editor and Sports Editor, the three core Online Department editors, a few more developers, an associate news editor, a photography editor and several adult members of our Board of Directors. Having all these people representing the interests and concerns of their respective departments meant that we didn’t overlook any major issues early in the planning stages. Also, because each department had a solid say in what we ended up building, it helped expedite the transition process from alpha to beta to official Web site with minimal pushback from staffers who liked the “old way” better.

In-person and long meetings are productive

Google Docs, email and weekly conference calls are great, but I’ve found that none is an effective substitute for a real-life meeting. We had three long meetings over the course of the development period: one to completely launch our blog network, one to create and decide on a general design for the Web site and one to discuss workflow. The meetings were hours long and were emotionally and mentally draining; things actually did get heated at times, which is healthy in a news hall. We left each time with an action plan and a bunch of confidence, and each meeting led to bursts of unparalleled productivity — which was especially important when we were in various corners of the country (and in some cases, the globe).

If the new one’s better, give it to the people

We could still label our site “beta” if we wanted. We released it with no newsletter feature, no RSS support, a few quirky archives problems, and a less-than-perfect photo uploading system on the back end. But our online readers have been unanimously supportive of the new site, even with those small annoyances, because on the whole, it’s much better than the old one. We solved three of those four problems in the first week and a half, and will release our newsletter feature very soon. Exactly zero of the many readers who gave us feedback chose to say something other than, “The new site is much better than the old one,” so even if you’re wary of releasing an unfinished product to the public, rest assured that as long as your site doesn’t crash and looks right in users’ browsers, you’ll be just fine. Your readers will thank you for giving them a much better experience even if it’s not perfect.

Combining technical and editorial wishes can be difficult

We’ve received hundreds of private emails in the past few years that basically say the same thing: your comment sections are offensive and unrepresentative of any sort of rational discussion. We wanted to do something to fix that with our new site. While our solution isn’t yet perfect (wherein all commenters must use a valid email address), it has decimated the number of offensive and inappropriate comments left on the site. Adding to its effectiveness was our realization that putting comments on a separate page (instead of right below the articles) would enable pages to load dozens of times faster and lower our hosting costs. You can marry the technical aspects and the editorial aspects of your project successfully, but sometimes it’s not so easy. For example, we custom-coded a module that allows readers to see date-specific front pages, which is a feature they enjoy but that caused us a lot of trouble at first. It can be difficult to ask someone to spend three weeks coding a feature when their services are needed elsewhere, but if your readers are going to expect something from you, try your hardest to deliver it.

Learn all you can about the power of Drupal

Dean Chen, the Lead Developer who coded our site, has some brief advice for those wishing to use Drupal. He encourages developers to learn the Drupal API and Drupal Coding Conventions from a book called Pro Drupal Development by VanDyk & Westgate. It’s a good idea to learn how to use and customize CCK, Panels and Views Modules, too. When it comes to browser testing, you can never test enough times. Check CSS and JS in all four major browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari) to ensure that styles and behavior are consistent. Making sure there were no browser incompatibility issues was a major focus of ours as it directly affects the way our work is perceived and our users’ browsing experience. Optimizations such as memcache make a huge difference performance-wise and are a must. Lastly, test and back up the code base early and often, especially before and after performance optimizations are made.

Never rest when you’re in charge of a “living thing”

Not enough newspapers post corrections or updates to their stories online, and we were guilty of that, too. Now, though, we’ve worked out an easy protocol for going back to modify content. Making sure all multimedia content is as fresh as possible is also very important, but it can be hard to stay on top of. Having a new Web site to present to people is a wonderfully fulfilling feeling, but it’s certainly fleeting. We have many other things we want to do now that we have the site running well on a day-to-day basis. We want to explore text notifications and mobile news tips; we want to drive more traffic to our site with social media; we want to innovate with different types of advertisements.

My personal favorite potential project is a video hub where we’ll invite all members of the Duke Community (e.g. students, faculty, staff, alumns, local residents, etc.) to add their videos to our database. There are thousands of YouTube videos out there that are Duke-related, including recordings of improvisational comedy shows, live music and guest speakers. The official Duke News office produces many high-quality video features, as well. Students working on projects in their classes could add their videos to the database. A simple submission form would be available for people whose videos we didn’t find at first. We would become the go-to source for any video that had a Duke tie, and because we’d have all the meta-data that comes with a YouTube video, we’d have an excellent search function. Our designers would create a stunning interface that would make watching videos on our site more enjoyable. None of this has been specifically planned, but I believe it would be an excellent addition to our Web site and a useful resource for tons of people, from prospective students to aspiring Duke artists to alumns thirty years removed from Duke.

Alex Klein is a junior at Duke University where he serves as Online Editor of The Chronicle, an independent student-run newspaper. Follow Alex on Twitter at @alexklein or email him at alex.klein@duke.edu.

Background

Before we started using a CMS, we were using a custom framework that we built using PHP, HTML and other Web technologies. In 2008, we decided our site was overdue for a redesign. In the process of planning the redesign, we made the decision to move to a CMS. We chose Drupal because we had someone that had experience in Drupal and we thought that Drupal looked like it would be a powerful CMS that would do everything we needed. As it turns out, Drupal is a powerful CMS and it did everything that we needed.

What’s good about Drupal

I would have to say that one of the key advantages of Drupal is its vast collection of modules, extensions that you can download and install. They provide extra functionality/features and they range from a wide variety of services. For almost everything we wanted to do on the site, we were able to find a module for. There are also plenty of modules that provide integration with third-party services like Google Analytics, forum software, etc. On the rare occasion that we couldn’t find a module we were happy with, we were able to write our own module or slightly modify one that already existed. Drupal provides a framework for doing both.

The other key advantage of Drupal would have to be its theme layer. When I say theme layer, I don’t just mean the themes that you can download to change how your site looks; I mean the way in which the HTML gets rendered. How the theme layer works is before something gets rendered, it will go through some sort of preprocessing. Preprocessing allows you to control when, where and how something gets rendered. The preprocessing process (try saying that ten times fast) is generally used to process dynamic data and content. Once the preprocessing is done, it will pass all the data and content to templates.

Drupal follows a structure when trying to find templates. It will first look for specific templates (templates that was made for displaying a specific item) and will look for more general templates until it finds one. In this way, you can create specific templates for individual cases and use general templates for everything else. The theme layer is kind of hard to explain and it gets some getting used to. Note that you can set where and how it looks for templates during the preprocessing. This way you can tell Drupal to use a certain template without it needing to search for one.

How we use Drupal

I won’t go over every aspect of how we used Drupal in this post but I will mention some key functionality that we use.

ImageCache

ImageCache is a wonderful and powerful module that we use widely for this new version. ImageCache essentially lets you display photos in different sizes.

Before we started using ImageCache, we were using a module that created several different sizes (that we defined) of every photo we uploaded. There are several problems to this. For one, it only gave us the option of defining about five different sizes. This was a serious limitation as we found that we wanted a lot of different sizes depending on the page and the place. Second, every photo that we uploaded was recreated in all these different sizes. Most of the time, we only used one size and didn’t use the rest. This wasted a lot of disk space and processing power as we didn’t really need those extra sizes.

ImageCache provided a solution to all those problems. With ImageCache, we could define presets that defined the size and even the method at which the photo would get re-sized. So we could have a particular image scaled down if we wanted to keep its aspect ratio or we could have it get cropped and scaled when we wanted to re-size the image but force a particular aspect ratio. Every preset created another copy of the photo with the specifications defined. ImageCache lets you define as many presets as you want and you can choose from several methods to let you manipulate photos. To display a photo on a page, you tell the preprocessing where the image is and what preset you want to use.

The best thing about ImageCache is that the image only gets created if it’s being displayed for the first time, meaning that every photo size which exists is being used at least once. This way we can preserve disk space. ImageCache also lets you “flush” all the photos for a particular preset. This means that all the photos for that preset will be deleted. Why is deleting photos useful? For most news sites, there are plenty of old stories that probably never get read; most of these stories probably have photos. These photos are just taking up space and if they’re rarely going to be displayed, why keep them around? When an old story does get viewed, ImageCache will automatically recreate the photos for that story and store them. This is possible because the original photo is always preserved.

If you navigate around mndaily.com, you’ll find that there are a lot of photos that get displayed in a lot of different sizes. For example, an A&E story that appears on the front page in the A&E section also gets displayed on the A&E page. Both images that get displayed along with the story are different sizes and when you click on the story, there is the same photo in yet another size. All those photos are generated using ImageCache. When the time comes — say, three months later — we can flush the images but they will be recreated automatically if someone ever views the story again.

Theming the site

We heavily and extensively use templates and preprocessing for theming our site (as shown by the unique designs for the different sections). We didn’t really do anything different from what we did before except customize the templates a lot more. Drupal allows great flexibility in theming and lets you create templates for almost anything on the site. We just took further advantage of that to create custom designs for the different sections.

We also extensively use two modules: Views and Content Construction Kit (CCK). CCK is used to create the different kinds of content on the site. We don’t just have one generic form for creating everything. Rather, we use specific forms that can display specific fields which apply to the type of content we’re creating. For example, while articles have fields for the reporter and the story text, a slideshow has fields for the images. Having these custom forms and fields is all done by CCK.

Views lets you pick the content to display on the site. Almost all content on mndaily.com is displayed using Views. With Views, you can pick the type of content that you want to display and run it through any filters (like by sections) and sort it by date. Views and CCK are extremely powerful modules that are probably used by almost every Drupal site.

Conclusion

Drupal is definitely a powerful CMS. I haven’t personally used any other software such as WordPress or Joomla but I have read many comparisons. For the most part, many say that Drupal provides a lot of flexibility and customization but it it is very hard to use compared to other software. Both points are definitely true. We had some trouble getting used to Drupal when we launched our redesign in 2008. This resulted in an incomplete site with bugs and errors. After using Drupal for an entire year, however, we have learned a lot and were able to launch the second version of the site with much success. Drupal definitely has a huge learning curve but once you know and understand Drupal, you have the ability to do a lot of cool things in a shorter time span.

For more information about the Minnesota Daily’s improved Web site, view this blog post on mndaily.com.

Son Huyhn is Online Manager for mndaily.com, the Web site of the Minnesota Daily at the University of Minnesota. Follow Son on Twitter at @shuynh21 or email him at shuynh@mndaily.com.

After three months of hard work, the Minnesota Daily has a brand new design to improve its layout and usability. Son Huynh gives us his take on theming Drupal, changing a paper’s workflow and reorganizing news content.

In addition, just last March, the Minnesota Daily teamed up with developers from NewsCloud to create a Facebook application as part of a not-for-profit research study sponsored by the Knight Foundation to find new ways of engaging young people in news readership and community engagement. As an incentive, the Minnesota Daily hosts challenges and implemented a point system to reward active readers with prizes for their participation (such as posting on the Facebook page, tweeting, following the paper on Twitter).

Son also talks about the challenges of building an online community around the paper and his plans to revamp the app by adding Facebook Connect, so users can access the paper while being logged on to Facebook, and a selection on the paper’s site to better connect student groups and campus events. The newest version of the Minnesota Daily is set to launch on Sept 8th. Be sure to check out the new multimedia section, which was in part inspired by the Onion.

Have feedback for the Minnesota Daily? Leave a comment or email Son at shuynh [at] mndaily [dot] com.

Listen live as Online Manager Son Hunyh and others from the Daily’s staff discuss the redesign and their ideas and plans for this year, including tactics to increase readership engagement. Be sure to join our live text chat below and call in to give feedback.

If you’re not able to listen live, please add your question as a comment.

When: Sunday, Aug. 30 at 5 p.m. ET

Where: BlogTalkRadio (or listen here with the embedded player)

Call-in number: (347) 843-4589

The Daily Tar Heel switched to Drupal, Sara Gregory says, because is more compatible with paper’s existing structure, size and content. She’s making online publication simpler by eliminating copy editors and desk editors from the process. Now only one desk level and one management editor read each online story before publication. Thanks to the redesign, readers can now subscribe to two different newsletters (regular and breaking news) and choose from numerous RSS feed options. The paper’s staff also added a new Community Manager position that is responsible for both of the paper’s regular and breaking news Twitter accounts as well as its Facebook account. Gregory’s upcoming projects include incorporating major linking within stories.

Will Davis made the transition to WordPress MU because he wanted The Maine Campus to have a variety of plug-ins and the potential to build a blog community. He set up custom-user permissions so writers post drafts to the Web site as well as a plug-in that emails staff when a draft is posted, cutting down the workflow to just two steps. The site also has a RSS feed for the entire site and newsletter for subscribers. Davis is in the works of launching “Campus Currents,” a user-generated wiki-based community site, and a user-generated restaurant guide. He hopes to integrate more multimedia production and interactivity online in the near future.

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Later: Sara informs me that Switchback is also helping with the website design.

Guests: Steve Contorno, former editor in chief of the University of Illinois’s The Daily Illini and Zach Valentire, the Webmaster of the Minnesota Daily. Dreier Carr, the photo editor of The Technician at North Carolina State.

Summary: Greg and Emily discuss the power of Drupal and the creation of The Daily Illini‘s own CMS on Drupal with Contorno. The former Editor in Chief continues the conversation by passing on tips to college publications considering Drupal. Valentire and Carr discuss the popularity of Drupal and how it’s no longer something you can ignore. The three editors analyze how the switch can be made, how Drupal can be incorporated into your college newspaper’s workflow, and each of their staffs’ responses to the switch.

Related blog post: A Brand New Drupally Daily Illini

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