CoPress

This past weekend, we released the beta version of Stage 1 (Custom Post Statuses) of the Edit Flow Project, a plugin aiming to improve the WordPress Admin Interface for a multi-user newsroom’s editorial workflow.

The main goal of this stage was to “improve posts statuses by allowing custom statuses.” WordPress, by default, only allows for two statuses for posts during the editing process: “Draft” and “Pending Review”. These statuses are not very descriptive nor do they make it easy to track a story as it moves through a newsroom’s often complex, multi-level workflow.

With the release of Stage 1 of Edit Flow, WordPress users can now assign custom statuses to posts, giving them more control over the state of their content.

Adding/Editing/Managing Custom Statuses

Upon activation, the plugin adds five default statuses (“Assigned”, “Draft”, “Pending Review”, “Pitch”, “Waiting for Feedback”). These can all be edited or deleted (with the exception of “Draft” and “Pending Review”, which can only be deleted). Users can also add additional custom statuses. Overall, we tried to make this as flexible as possible, acknowledging the extreme diversity in workflows and requirements across different newsrooms.

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If you’ve been keeping watch in the forum lately you may have seen some talk about a College Web Design Camp for student newspapers. I posted some preliminary information on the wiki a couple days ago and this is a more formal introduction to the idea.

The main goals

Our goal is to create an environment within which college news organizations, web developers, and editors can come together to collaborate and exchange ideas about their summer website design projects.

An inherent problem that college news organizations have to deal with is the high rates of staff turnover every four years. This means that some years the tech/web staff is robust and at others it is scarce. By providing virtual space in which everyone can exchange code, ideas, and projects we are hoping that everyone will gain web development skills that can be passed on down to future staff members.

Finally, in the spirit of transparency and collaboration, all training sessions and demos will be recorded and posted online. This will provide examples of all the code used in the sessions so that anyone can download and implement the ideas presented.

The first collaboration session

The first session will be held on May 28th at 5:00 p.m. PT. It will serve as an introduction for everyone to the project and to each other’s sites. We’ll seek to answer some of the questions below:

• What does your site look like now and what are the main goals that you hope to achieve during the summer?
• What skills does everyone have? Are you ridiculously good at creating gorgeous drop-down menus in WordPress? If so, then perhaps you’d be interested in leading a session for everyone.
• What have you found to be some of the biggest obstacles to successful college web development to be? What would have helped you along the way?

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We’re changing things up! Our choice of the best links of the week are now at the top of We Clicked On (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Owned? Legal terms of video hosting services compared – Joey Baker: Video sharing sites treat your copyright differently. Summary: the best sites are the most restrictive.
• 4 productive summer projects for j-students – Daniel Bachhuber: Proactive summer J project ideas from @laurenmichell. It would be sweet to see experimentation with the news wiki.
• 10 Ideas I Want to Try at the Newspaper Where I Work – Daniel Bachhuber: I dig the ideas Will has for community relationship management, as well as using data and APIs well.
• Steve Ballmer, Microsoft – The Future of Microsoft, The Future of Technology – Daniel Bachhuber: Steve Balmer makes a case for entrepreneurship in the economic downturn.

The most notable news of the week, however, is that Greg taught me the stylistic considerations of headlines and subheads.

Activity around the network

In the forum this week, Joey asked the crowd about their editorial workflows within WordPress. Lauren Rabaino left the lengthiest answer, explaining in detail how the Mustang Daily is currently operating their web-first workflow. Writers upload their documents into WordPress, and then the editing happens within the CMS. The information about these interactions is managed in a Google Spreadsheet.

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The most fascinating news this week was a huge change that is coming to the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism with the recommendation of all incoming freshman journalism students purchase either an iPod Touch or iPhone. These tools are likely to completely revolutionize the importance of mobile technology and take MoJo training to a new level. Other J schools: take note.

Around the Network

Conversation on the forum was light this week with Andrew Spittle of the Whitman Pioneer asking for feedback on the upcoming Web Design Collaboration Series that is likely to take place this summer.

Responses came in quite quickly with several community members saying they would be on board for the project and even offered their own ideas.
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The big news this week was BarCamp Philly on April 25, which a majority of CoPress attended. The day was a great success – filled with insightful conversations and great networking. Where else will find new media thinkers all in the same room trying to solve the problems in the industry? If you missed out on all the fun, check out the media from the day’s events.

Around the Network

This past week Greg Linch started an interesting conversation on the Forum by asking, “Do you plan to redesign or in any other way redo your college news site this summer? If so, please explain.”
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Rick Martinez’s “Summer of Code” plans for Nameless CMS, a Ruby on Rails option that is on its way to becoming open source, include writing a Ruby library for creating and working with InCopy files, an overhaul of the admin to incorporate workflow features, and an alpha release for people to play with. If you’re a RoR developer, he’s looking for people to collaborate with too.