CoPress

CICM deserves the hat tip for this one: earlier this week, The Daily Illini, a student newspaper at the University of Illinois, launched a brand new website built from Drupal:

You’ll notice immediately on the home page some of the new features we have introduced. The goal was to provide more entry points to our content, something we felt our old site failed to accomplish. The “What’s new” box highlights the latest information and will update as soon as new content is posted on the site. Additionally, the ticker at the top provides links to other recent stories, giving you easier access to the most up-to-the-minute news.

On the right-hand bar, you can find stories that your fellow readers are looking at, commenting on or recommending to help you decide what the most interesting news of the day might be. Scroll down, and you’ll notice our multimedia has been beefed up as well, something you should see throughout the site. Not to jump ahead, but the multimedia page itself is filled with interesting stories told in non-traditional ways. We hope you enjoy the videos, photo galleriesand audio slideshows presented in a much friendlier manner.

Our individual section pages are broken down much the same as before — News, Sports,Opinions, Diversions — however, the pages themselves are completely revamped. Not only are they better organized to look like individual home pages, but they are also divided by content in the tabs at the top. So if you’re hoping to find the most recent UI news, click the campus tab. Looking for the latest info on Illini basketball team? Go to the men’s basketball tab. All our content throughout the site is sorted how we think you’ll most easily find it.

All and all, these are what seem to be pretty cool updates (I can see that Albert has already asked about newsletter software). +1 for having a development blog too.

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!

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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.