If you haven’t upgraded yet, download it from the Plugin Directory or directly from within WordPress.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the new features introduced in this release:

Usergroups

Version 0.3+ adds in what are called usergroups. On the outset, they’re similar to “Roles” built into WordPress, except that (at this stage) usergroups are simply ways to associate groups of users together. Edit Flow adds a number of sample usergroups for you to get started (as shown above) and get a sense of what sort of groupings you can create. However, the main power of usergroups comes with…

Notification Controls

Much of the feedback Edit Flow received since the email notification were introduced centered around having greater control over who receives notifications. Previously, post updates were emailed to authors, editorial commenters, and any roles that had been selected to receive notifications. Many people were drawn to the notification feature but were forced to keep it disabled since they didn’t want all their editors or administrators notified on every single post update.

With the new release, you can specify on a post level, what users and usergroups should receive notifications, so that only relevant individuals and groups of individuals receive updates.

Note: with the introduction of this feature the “Notify by Role” option was removed. In its place, a new feature was added “Always notify admin option” which includes the blog administrator in all notifications. To all overly protective, nosy admins that want to know everything: you’re welcome

This is just the beginning of notifications. Some interesting ideas that we’d like to integrate in future versions of Edit Flow include:

• Giving users the ability to subscribe to posts themselves
• Have specific users or usergroups automatically subscribed to posts based on categories or tags assinged to posts.
• Make the UI a bit more efficient. The UI for this new feature is something that was unfortunately rushed. My original vision didn’t quite make it in (due to various impracticalities, changes, and lack of time), but it’s very much a high priority on my list to make it easy to select users/usergroups (especially for installs with hundreds and thousands of users).

More Useful Notifications

On the topic of notifications, the new release introduces emails that are slightly more descriptive in terms of the action taken on the post. The subject line of the email will specify whether the post was created, published, unpublished, etc. Although a small change, it should hopefully help users manage incoming emails more effectively and not get inundated with a barrage of “Post Status was changed” emails. (Interestingly, I’ve found that this new change comes in handy even on my personal blog which is a simple on-user blog. I find these notifications fairly useful especially since I make aggresive use of WordPress’ future scheduling functionality.)

Additionally, the action links in comment notifications now take the user directly to the editorial comment form (e.g. clicking on “Add editorial comment” will open the post and take to directly to the Editorial Comment form). Again, not a major feature but something that should hopefully save you some time, scrolling and future dealings with Carpal Tunnel.

I’d like to extend this feature even further and allow users to reply to comments via email and not have to go into WordPress to do so. (As you can see, there’s a bit a time-saving trend going on here.)

New widget: Posts I’m Following

Still a little crude at this stage, this new widget gives you a list of the most recently updated posts that you’re following. However, this widget will likely form the basis of the activity stream, which will provide an audit trail of activity happening within the WordPress admin.

Knight News Challenge Round II

While not really a feature introduced in 0.3+, here’s a bit of news that may be interest: we’ve submitted our 2nd round application for the Knight News Challenge. Check out it, vote, and leave us some feedback.

What’s Next?

Apart from some of the ideas already mentioned, with the next couple of Edit Flow releases, you can expect to see some great features such as:

• Post task lists (a la Basecamp, namely a list of tasks that must be completed in order for a post to be published)
• Better Post Management (to help you track and manage your content better, such as snapshots of how far along existing content is)
• HTML emails (because emails should always be pretty — but always fallback to plain text for people still living in the ’90s)

Your Homework

As always, your feedback is much appreciated and vital to our development. Let us know what about Edit Flow works for you and what doesn’t and what else Edit Flow can do to improve your organization’s WordPress experience.

We’ve already had discussions with several online and print publishers and newsrooms interested in adopting Edit Flow and would love to include you in that conversation. Why not get in touch?

Hey college news, it’s your older brother: hyperlocal.

We’re not so different, you and I. We’re both industries dominated by the inexperienced. We both have to cover a specific community. In fact, it could be argued that collegiate journalism is a subset of hyperlocal.

Fortunately for you this means that we all share the same problems. Both college newspapers and hyperlocal sites are figuring out the best ways to monetize a geographic area of like-minded people, often through the Web.

Thanks to Jeff Jarvis and the folks at CUNY, we know that some hyperlocal sites are pulling in $200,000 a year. We also know of some college newspapers that are self-sustaining. There are successful companies in both our spaces, yet many of us struggle to grasp the fundamentals of the business.

That is why the team behind Technically Philly has proposed News Inkubator, a shared office spaces and business services hub for hyperlocal news sites in Philadelphia. Picture a shared office space and a shared sales staff that help hyperlocals generate revenue ideas together, while still maintaining their editorial and business independence.

News Inkubator is also about bridging the entrepreneurial and media communities in Philadelphia to help foster a working relationship were each side learns from the other. All of these concepts can translate to benefit your college publication. In fact, here are three of our ideas that I hope you steal:

Use the existing bureaucracy

Universities have already separated students by interest. The computer science students often belong to a different school than the business students that belong to a different school than the journalism students. Why not bring all three of these sides together?

Each can have a project for the semester and learn from the other students. To survive in 2010, journalism grads are going to need to know how businesses work. Business grads are going to have to understand new media and computer science students need client work to showcase when they graduate.

If time becomes an issue, lobby to create a new class. Department heads love to show each other how innovative they are, so ask them to help.

The space is cheap

Many college newspapers rent (or are given) office space from the university negating one of the biggest hurdles in legitimizing an online hyperlocal entity. Use this to your advantage. Host speakers that are business leaders from local companies. You could even spring for some pizza and host a hackathon or barcamp open to all majors and career paths to build products for the paper.

Spoke, meet hub

Many college have student-run blogs or organization websites. Aggregate and create content partnerships with everyone who also covers what you cover. There is no need for overlap in your college’s media market.

As the college newspaper, you have an established editorial process and revenue streams, so offer to be the hub for your local sites and maybe even work out a revenue sharing plan. It will be good training for covering any niche after you graduate and can free up your paper’s already limited resources to pursue more in-depth journalism and even work on new revenue models together.

The three founders of Technically Philly met at the Temple News, and we use the skills we learned there everyday. Use your time at a college newspaper to not only flex your reporting muscles but also see if you can start a side project that makes a little more money for the paper. Your wallet will thank you when you graduate.

Be sure to give our application a read and offer any criticism. The harsher, the better.

Contact Sean Blanda at sean@technicallyphilly.com or follow him on Twitter, @seanblanda.

This week, CoPress directors Daniel Bachhuber, Andrew Spittle, Lauren Rabaino and Adam Hemphill are attending the National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas. These are reports from the field. For more updates, follow the conversation on Twitter.

In the “Townsquare” session, led by Arvil Ward and Anthony Pesce, the Populous Project was demoed. The Populous Project is a Knight News Challenge funded project that is working to build a content management system for student news publications based on Django.

Among the technologies demoed were the Digital Newsroom, which is a system of tracking story assignments that is currently implemented by the UCLA Daily Bruin. As Arvil said, “this provides a communication tool with the ability to manage the newsroom online.” It has threaded commenting for story ideas and notifications for when an assignment changes. Interestingly, it is not yet integrated with the content management system and how closely it will be able to manage content is to be determined.

Also demoed was Campuswalk, UCLA’s project to create a unified, cohesive, and searchable campus gateway. The current system is not up to the task in the eyes of Arvil and they’re working hard at building something better. It will make professor reviews, housing reviews, and swapping books more social.

The final piece of the demo was Localresearch.com. Arvil described this as focused marketing to small local businesses that seeks to reinvent the decreasing value of print advertising. They provide a database of local business listings and for $45 a month they work with companies to create more full-featured listings that include links to social media, reviews, and more.

• Two Knight News Challenge projects have been open-sourced: EveryBlock and ReportingOn. With the right developers and the right ideas, both of these code bases could be the foundation for something really cool at a student newspaper. Andrew Dunn is already thinking about a “Ask the Reporter”-style website.
• Gazette Communications is looking for an Online News Editor with a keen eye for innovation. My prediction: they are going to have a number of applications from highly-qualified recent graduates. This is one of those companies you’d want to start a 21st century career with.
• We’ve all heard a number of theses on why industries fail but most put fault with the leadership. Michael Nielsen’s essay on scientific publishing posits another hypothesis: the leading companies are too good at what they do in their industry, are highly geared towards being too good, and are nearly impossible to reorient when the industry evolves or no longer matters.
• Mark Briggs covers all of the metrics you might want to consider as benchmarks for your newsroom. Watch his blog for a series of posts from his upcoming textbook, to be published this fall.

I’m considering changing the format of this weekly post to be a more informal synthesis of the things that have happened in the past week. If you have an opinion on the matter, let me know.

Around the network, Sean Sullivan is looking for opinions on the best wiki for putting together a history of a school budget crisis (I assume he’s looking for both the best software and approach). If the project is big enough to merit the investment, I’d say MediaWiki would be the tool of choice. It’s themeable and has a plugin architecture that lets you extend it. Will Davis and I are going to be playing with the Semantic MediaWiki extension so that you can indicate some information as structured data and do cool things with the aggregate of it (related: check out the information Will added to the profile of The Maine Campus; this is going to be really cool when we have this type of information on a number of newspapers).

Rick Martinez had the first meeting for FIUSM developers earlier today. I’ll see if I can get him to give us some clues on what they’ll be working on this year. Developers plural must mean that FIUSM is going to be doing more than basic website maintenance this coming year.

• Rebooting The News #13 – Excellent discussion about how news coverage is already rebooting itself in the context of Iran, and the “newsroom as a cafe” concept gets discussed (and recommended).
• Gary Kebbel on the Knight News Challenge: Repetitive ideas, tougher judges hurt some applicants – Josh Benton asks questions related to the current round of News Challenge grantees.
• WooThemes GPL’ed - All of themes released by Woo from June 2009 onward will be licensed under the GPL.
• Co-Authors Plus Upgraded to v1.2 – Mo Jangda updated the Co-Authors plugin to be compatible for WordPress 2.8 and a couple other bug fixes.

Around the Network:

In the forum this week, conversation was focused on the design camp, with Andrew Spittle discussing article pages. He suggested:

I thought I’d get it going by including a list of some of the sites that I think do a good job with articles. Among others I like the design of:

• The Atlantic – Great job of creating a consistent design between the site in general and article pages specifically. Bold typography and borders keep it flowing.
• The New York Times (sometimes) – I know a lot of people love to hate on the New York Times, but I think that their article pages are superb a lot of the time. The line length and fonts work well for me. Also, I think the way in which they incorporate links to other related content (slideshows, video, other articles, etc.) is great.
• Instapaper – Yeah, it’s not technically a news site, but I think that Marco is on to something with the design. Instapaper provides not only the ability to save articles to read later, but also allows for you to view the article as text only. This removes ads and some of the more distracting elements of some sites. Sometimes simplicity is great.

On the wiki this week, John Mrystad added a number of free, high-quality WordPress themes including Hybrid News and Joey edited the ethics page.

Guest: Chris O’Brien, Project Manager at The Next Newsroom Project

Summary: Greg talks with Chris about the Next Newsroom project, an initiative to create a new home for The Duke Chronicle and determine what the “next” college newsroom should entail. Chris discusses how the idea came about, the process leading up to the report, the final report and where the project goes from here.

Related: Weekly Forum Discussion – Restructuring your organization

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

Description (1800 characters) – Verdict: We’re golden, answer is within limit.

CoPress is a holistic, non-profit, open-source, and community-driven initiative to provide student news organizations with the technical ecosystem they need to thrive during the evolution to digital information gathering and distribution.

We want to reinforce the tremendous value which comes from passionate learners working together on common problems. At the moment, CoPress includes three parts: the software, the community, and the knowledge. CoPress will support popular CMS options with continuing code development, plugins, tuning to create workflows that fit our sector, and fee-for-service hosting/management (similar to the WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org experience). Through this process, CoPress will connect student newspaper online editors, webmasters, and developers with their peers through a variety of means, including a social network that plugs into the backend of CMS options, regular regional work sessions, and an actively updated directory of contact information and current projects. Finally, CoPress is an open model where all knowledge is recorded, indexed, and available. Our hub will provide members with the intellectual resources (tutorials, documentation, videos, podcasts, webinars, etc.) they need to improve their digital distribution platform. Members will be able to edit, contribute and improve the resource for their peers.

How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities? (750 characters) – Verdict: only the first paragraph fits. Whoops.

With the near ubiquity of the web comes a tremendous potential for student news organizations to be far more engaged with their audience, and vice versa. CoPress is the network where online editors, webmasters and developers can come together with ideas and collaborate to make those ideas reality. At the moment, there is no such network for student news organizations. Those who have done innovative things with their online presence to date largely do so because of a unique level of talent at their organization. We believe it’s important for every student news organization to be creating a more engaged campus. A campus powered by increased digital access to information through functionality which shouldn’t be hindered the platform.

Thanks to the creativity of those involved with CoPress, we’ve got more than plenty of ideas to build levels of engagement, including:

• Geo-specific mobile delivery
• Voting functionality which lets the community decide which stories make the front page, much like Digg or Reddit
• Ability to track comment discussion by RSS, email, or Facebook and other means
• A newswire in the dashboard which automatically pulls links from other student news organizations based on your position. For instance, the links for a sports editor/reporter would be weighted differently then those for a news editor/reporter

Fortunately, the way that we’re approaching the CMS constraints, and overall digital distribution issues, allow us to divide and conquer on the ideas we’d like implemented. We’re structured with sustainable future growth in mind. CoPress is about building the open, inclusive community needed for student media to thrive in this crazy new age of technology.

Currently, CoPress is already connecting student news organizations at schools including the University of Oregon, the University of Miami, UCLA, Syracuse University, Swarthmore, Wake Forest, East Conneticut State, Temple University, University of Florida, University of Pennsylvania, and others. Not only that, but the network is growing rapidly thanks to the viral strength of Twitter and other social communication tools. CoPress is about structuring the network so that it is efficient and effective in achieving these common goals.

How is your idea innovative? (New or different from what already exists.) (750 characters) – Verdict: A paragraph and a half fits.

At the moment, there is no talented, diverse, and distributed body of student developers and technologists working together around improving a community platform for their specific needs. The people are there, but they need to be connected and coordinated because we face similar problems and can be far more powerful when we work together.

CoPress is not a content management system (CMS). We have no intention to invent yet another CMS. Our goal is to reinvent the options already out there, and tune them so that students can be more informed closer collaboration on platform development amongst student news organizations. Last year, the Knight Foundation funded the Populous Project at UCLA. The team behind Populous hopes to build a kick-ass CMS that provides real neat functionality. CoPress has been talking with Populous over the past few months and can’t wait for the time when we get to help them add to and improve the product.

We think student news organizations need to be involved in a collaborative process. For instance, say Daniel wants to implement shortlinks for his URLs, so that the links can be included in the print edition and students can tear out the URLs for the articles they want to comment on. Joey has already done this with his website, so Daniel gets help from Joey in setting this up. That’s the 1.0 collaboration model. 2.0 happens when Daniel and Joey work in connection over the internet, screen-capturing the process so that Betsy, Billy, and John can follow along too and implement the same feature at their news organization. Even more powerful is the 3.0 model, where the system automatically suggests features you should install based on what you’ve installed before and what your peers are installing. If we’re working on a common platform, and are connected in a network, then we can collaborate and innovate together, allowing us to build off the successes of everyone’s collective efforts.

CoPress aspires to be the synthesis for all of these connections.

What experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project? (1800 characters) – Verdict: Our response almost makes it, but not quite.

We’re bringing together the best and the brightest to ensure long-term success of the network. We gather experience from everywhere we can, and our open, distributed, model allows us to assign tasks based on skill set, workload and need. We’ve gathering experienced folks in the right positions from across the country to support our vision, and will continue to do so as we scale. Honestly, it’s surprising just how many like-minded individuals think CoPress is a network worth building.

The CoPress team is a conglomeration of development, design, editing, and management talent from all across the nation, including Daniel Bachhuber from the Oregon Daily Emerald, Greg Linch from the Miami Hurricane, Kevin Koehler from the Old Gold & Black, Adam Hemphill, Joey Baker from The Daily Orange, Albert Sun from the Daily Pennsylvanian, Miles Skorpen of the Swarthmore Daily, Jared Silfies from the Temple News, Rick Martinez of FIU Student Media, and Ken Schwencke from the Independent Florida Alligator, among others. These are innovators who are actively leading the charge at their student news organizations, innovating on their own with platforms such as WordPress, Expression Engine, Drupal, Ruby on Rails, and Django.

Additionally, we’ve received feedback on CoPress’ evolution from Knight Challenge grantees including Anthony and Dharmishta of the Populous Project, Ryan Sholin of ReportingOn, Pat Thornton of BeatBlogging.net, JD Lasica, and David Cohn of SpotUs. CoPress is also supported by Bryan Murley of the Center for Innovation in College Media, Drew Geraets of the CUNY J School, Major Highfield, and Patrick Beeson.

Most importantly, everyone we’ve spoken to is enthusiastic about the potentials of collaborating through these means. We are quite confident that, if student news organization are going to survive the change from print to digital, working with CoPress is one of the few ways they can do so successfully.

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.