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.

The “Add/Edit/Manage Custom Statuses” screen (screenshot above) is reminiscent of the interface used to manage categories and tags. From a design stand-point, we tried to keep with standard WordPress interface conventions (to minimize the learning curve) and, similarly, make the plugin as less intrusive as possible.

Assigning Custom Statuses to Posts

With custom statuses defined, they can now be assigned to posts. The plugin adds the custom statuses to the “Status” dropdown when editing a post (screenshot above). Additionally, given the likely frequency of use of this feature, the Status dropdown is made visible by default. The plugin also allows you to set a default status for new posts, which WordPress sets to “Draft” by default.

Managing Posts

To ease the management of content, a new column is added to the Edit/Manage Posts screen that indicates the current status of the posts displayed. Additionally, the posts on this screen can be filtered by status, by clicking on the links at the top.

Dashboard Widget

As a small bonus, we threw in a small dashboard widget that gives you a quick glance of the state of currently unpublished content. As this was a last minute addition, it’s minimal and largely unstyled, but something we’ll clean up and build out more in the coming days.

Version Compatibility and Internationalization

The plugin relies heavily on JavaScript, and given recent changes to the core, we’ve decided to only support WordPress 2.8 onwards. If there is enough demand for backwards compatibility, we may consider supporting older versions. For now, and the remainder of the plugin, we will be focusing on compatibility with WordPress 2.8+. Additionally, internationalization isn’t currently supported, but something we hope to build into the next Stage of the plugin.

Download

You can find Stage 1 of the plugin on the WordPress Plugin Directory. Alternatively, download it from within WordPress using the built-in Plugin Manager (just search for “Edit Flow”).

Feedback and What’s Next

As this is the first official (albeit beta) release of Edit Flow, it is likely still rough around the edges. We’re very open to feedback though. Leave a comment below telling us what you think is broken, missing, or could be improved. (Praise doesn’t hurt either). Alternatively, feel free to submit any issues or requests that you run into on our GitHub page.

Up next, Daniel will be leading efforts for Stage 2 (Additional Post Meta Data) of the plugin, which will be working to add newsroom specific meta-data to posts. Stay tuned to our progress as we work through Stage 2.

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?

From there I’ll draft up a more detailed list of the sessions involved and who will be leading them. Keep reading for a list of what I’m hoping to cover!

What will be covered

A lot of the material will depend upon who participates, so if you see something in the list below that you’re an expert in then let us know in the forum. Below is a rough list of what we’ve come up with thus far:

• Navigation menus
• Creating category/topical landing pages
• Creating a radical homepage design that focuses on the community’s social activity
• Incorporating a wiki into the site
• Incorporating a forum into a site
• All about typography (how do you create a consistent feel?)
• Article pages (where do you put ads? serif or sans-serif?)
• Working with CSS3 techniques and how they can help you

These will be more than just how-to sessions though. When we cover navigation menus, we will spend time critiquing the existing menus of everyone involved so that you can get a feel for what others like or dislike about you existing design.

In addition to the involvement of student developers around the country, we’re planning on having a few professionals join the camp too.

Sign up

The schedule for these sessions is tentatively set to begin on May 28th and to run every week through early to mid-July. This will give all involved a half dozen tips, tricks, and opinions to take with them as they finish their design projects throughout the rest of the summer.

Made it all the way through that and still interested? There are two things you need to do. First, sign up for the entire series via our online form. Second, RSVP for the first session on Facebook. Depending on the interest, we may have double up sessions or limit the number of participants.

Get ready for a fun summer of happy designing!

• 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.

The wiki is where the real party was happening this week. Related to the Mustang Daily’s workflow, a few of us have been sketching out a spec to build functionality into WordPress to enhance editorial workflows, and enable newspapers like the Mustang Daily to conduct their entire operation within the CMS instead of having to add a Google Spreadsheet on top. These ideas have materialized in the form of the Edit Flow Project. Look for a more detail post on the project’s goals next week.

Also on the wiki, Lauren Rabaino has been doing a stellar job adding more student news organizations to the Network directory. Late last night I had an “aha!” moment when I figured out you could apply meta data of a sort to these directory pages. The result? Sorting by CMS, location, or type of publication. As we add more information to the system, hopefully with your help, this will become an increasingly useful database of what student news organizations across the nation are doing with their web technology. If your organization is missing, please feel free to add it by following the criteria at the top of the Network page.

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.

Kevin Koheler suggested,

Instead of focusing each session on a particular WordPress trick or CSS technique, perhpas it’d be better to focus on a particular element of news site design. List of potential topics:

1. Article pages
   • Typography: headlines, body text, etc
   • Photos, captions
   • Media – slideshows, video, maps
   • Sidebars
   • Links, and other attachments
   • Comments
2. Advertisements
3. Navigation
4. Front page
5. Breaking news
6. Blogs

On the wiki this week, Lauren updated and organized the CoPress Network Page while Emily updated this week’s TWiC show notes with Max Cutler and Richard Baskin of Courant News.

In the News

Last but not least, here are the top four links from the past week that you should check out this weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• On Forward Thinking in College News – Max Cutler looks at why the news industry needs developers.
• Mustang Daily considering 4 days a week, front page ads – Media Board is considering going to four days/week and running advertising on the front page.
• 101 Techniques for a Powerful CMS using WordPress – WordPress Theme hacks, ideas, tips and useful tutorials you need to have ready in hand when developing WordPress websites
• Young journalists should learn how to write a business plan – Christopher Wink thinks that student journalists should know how to write a business plan

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.”

Responses came in quite quickly with Connect2Mason, Whitman Pioneer, TheCampusBuzz, and The Daily Tar Heel are among the sites that are looking to redesign this summer.

On the wiki this week, Emily updated the WordPress Examples page with a list of college media organizations currently on WordPress.

In the News

Last but not least, here are the top four links from the past week that you should check out this weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• CoTweet! – How business does Twitter – Designed for businesses using Twitter to engage existing customers and attract new ones, CoTweet is a comprehensive Twitter business platform that supports both proactive marketing communication and response-driven customer support.
• Courant News Project Site – The Courant News Project has launched a site with more detailed information on their open source CMS based on Django.
• Getting Journalism Education Out of the Way -  Just maybe journalism education gets in the way of cultivating good journalists. After all, more than half of the 59 percent of print journalists who won Pulitzer Prizes never studied journalism.
• Announcing WordPress Plugin Competition (3.0) – The competition runs for three months from May 1st to July 31st.
• First Look at the Daily Tar Heel -  The Daily Tar Heel and it’s brand new look.