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?

For those of you who couldn’t make it, here is a sampling of what you missed:

Case Study: WNET.org

WNET.org worked with Tierra Innovation to build 50 sites in 10 months using WordPress MU.
Related:

• WordPress CMS Toolkit and Best Plugins.
• Sleepless in Social Media: WordCamp NYC 2009 WNET.org case study
• WordPress Publisher Blog: Fifty Sites. Ten Months. One CMS.
• Case Study: How a Non-Profit Media Company Profits from Building Open Source Online Publishing Platform (PDF)

BuddyPress Group API Extension

Andy Peatling, lead developer on BuddyPress, talked about the new Group API Extension and showed how it could be used to pull Twitter feeds into BuddyPress groups.

Related

• BuddyPress Group Extension API
• Presentation: BuddyPress: An Introduction
• Presentation: Cooking with BuddyPress

Case Study: TrueSlant.com

True/Slant, launched in April 2009, is built on WordPress MU and has more than 220 contributors/bloggers. One full-time editor selects posts for the homepage and topic stream pages.

The editor can activate “Editorial goggles,” allowing them to move content around the page by drag and drop. The system uses “heavy” JQuery to make this possible, according to Steve McNally, CTO for True/Slant. The editor can also add custom headlines, while still leaving the author’s original headline intact.

Content and contributors are also featured based on their “reputation” – a set of approximately 18 desirable behaviors (e.g. page views, posting frequency).

True/Slant, currently hosted on Slicehost, gives bloggers a detailed stats page to encourage them to grow their audience.

McNally said one of the challenges was to cross-reference content across many individual blogs, which tend to be fairly isolated in WordPress MU. Still, he said it was an easy decision to use WordPress MU and that he has “no regrets.”

Related

• Managing Flow in the New Newsroom
• Steve McNally: Musings of a New News Startup
• True/Slant: About

Hyperlocal Journalism with BuddyPress

Related

• InJersey.com
• SeeClickFix

Also of Note

• WordCamp NYC 2009
• P2 Theme
• WordPress 2.9 Features (e.g. image editing, post thumbnails, trash)
• WordPress & WordPress MU Merge in 3.0
• WPPlugins.com (“The WordPress App Store”)

After a long hiatus, CoPress finally released v0.2 of Edit Flow this past weekend. Those who have it installed should have seen a notification to update; for those who haven’t jumped on the Edit Flow bandwagon yet, grab it from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

We’ve got some cool new features in this new version, outlined below:

Post Metadata

Some basic fields have been added to allow users to capture additional newsroom-related data for each article. While it’s pretty sparse right now, the feature is something we’d like to flesh out once we get further details on how people hope to use this functionality. Additionally, it ties in really well to QuickPitch (described below). The fields we’ve added include:

• Description
• Due Date
• Location

Quick Pitch

A near-clone of the QuickPress Dashboard widget, the idea behind this was to allow reporters to propose new story ideas conveniently from the WordPress dashboard. Submitting a new pitch using QuickPitch creates a new post with the post metadata populated (based on the fields entered) and assigned the default custom status specified in your Edit Flow settings. The cool thing here is that an email notification is automatically triggered when a new pitch is created. (Notifications described below.) With the next release we’d like to add more control over who gets QuickPitch notifications as well as a template tag to make it visible on the front end.

Editorial Comments

Edit Flow now supports editorial comments. With this feature, discussions on posts/articles can now take place between editorial staff within the WordPress administration interface. This can cut down on long-winded back-and-forth email threads as all comments are conveniently displayed within the Edit Posts page to better facilitate online workflows. Threading is supported (assuming it’s enabled on your site — to enable threading, turn on the option to “Enable threaded (nested) comments” found under Settings > Discussion). We display gravatars for all users.

Notifications

Basic email notification support has been added, as well. Email notifications are delivered when a post’s status changes or when an editorial comment is added to a post (see screenshots above and below). Notifications are delivered to:

• Post author and Administrators, by default;
• Any specified roles (under Edit Flow > Settings); and
• Any users that comment on posts.

As with QuickPitch, we’d like to introduce the ability for more granular control over who gets post notifications, such as the ability for users to click a button to follow a post, or for notifications to be delivered to certain users based on the category of each post.

Internationalization

As promised, support for internationalization has been included in Edit Flow v0.2. For anyone interested in translations, the POT file is included in the plugin when you download it from the WordPress Plugin Directory. It’s not perfect, but we’re getting there. If you have a translation that you’d like to share, please send it to us and we’ll gladly include it in future releases of the plugin.

Phase 3 and onward

Okay, so what’s next? We’ve got some ideas that have already outlined above. Outside of that, we’re looking at things such as additional Dashboard widgets (e.g. editorial comments), personalized activity streams and RSS feeds, and maybe taking a crack at some of the bigger workflow pieces (e.g. user groups). We’ve deviated a fair bit from our original plans but we’re still on track to continue building Edit Flow and improving the WordPress admin interface for newsrooms.

What we need to move forward, though, is your feedback. Are you using Edit Flow? Let us know what about Edit Flow works for you and what doesn’t. Not using it? We’d love to hear why not. Finally, what other areas of the WordPress admin do you think we could help improve for your newsroom or multi-author blog?

We’re all ears.

Experimentation in the newsroom is one of the best ways to learn new skills and discover full potential of your team. Now that you understand why it’s time to innovate, how to create a web-centric newsroom and how to invest in your staff, it’s time to start experimenting.

To get you thinking, this video presents a few ideas as a starting point for your next staff meeting.

If you still need a little more ammunition, CoPress’ summer design camp has a great series of discussions about news wikis, landing pages and article layouts, among other ideas to get you started.  Our blog and wiki also have resources  about setting up a Facebook fan page, e-mail newsletter, web-first workflow and open-source software.

These are just a few of the project ideas we’ve discussed at CoPress. Do you have a better one? If so, head on over to our forums or leave a comment on this post and let the community help you brainstorm.

• Rob Curley at the Las Vegas is looking for fall interns that know the latest and greatest of the web and can “write their backsides off.” At Serra Media, Mark Briggs wants “fresh perspectives and top-notch talent” to join his team for 9 to 12 weeks.
• Andy Dickinson released a WordPress plugin on Tuesday that allows the author to comment on individual paragraphs in the post. It’s wonderful to see some of the greatest things about the News Mixer project being ported over the WordPress. Now we wait for the plugin that allows you to do 140 character comments natively. (Tks Greg Linch for the link)
• If better self-branding is a goal for the fall, then Mindy McAdams has an excellent list of ten tips for you. Notable priorities: making sure someone can find you by googling your first and last name, posting your resume online in HTML and not as a PDF (although having it available as a PDF download can also be useful), and being a part of the conversation online. (Tks Brian Manzullo for the link)
• In the past week, Twitter as all about Facebook, FriendFeed, and tr.im. Jeffery Zeldman, a notable designer, has taken the approach of not using any third-party URL shorteners and instead runs all of his posts off his own domain with a WordPress plugin called, you guessed it, “Short URL plugin.” If your domain is short enough that this makes sense, it would probably be a worthwhile approach that would help avoid link rot. On a related note, Max Cutler and David Estes came down to Portland last weekend. One of the projects that actually came to life was a URL shortener app for Courant News.

There are at least a few active conversations going on in the forum that you should check out. Chris Ullyott is putting together a staff page for the Daily Titan and is figuring out a way to automatically pull in profile images to the page. I started a thread for a Featured Posts widget I’d like to build when I have the chance.

Kevin Koehler and Megan Taylor have been working hard on new content for the wiki that we hope to start introducing over the weekend. In the meantime, Kevin is compiling a list of blogs related to specific topics that wants your input.

• Ability to ignore certain categories/posts
• Text and E-mail editions
• At least a per-issue and breaking news e-mail option. Best case scenario, customizable newsletter categories
• A basic, customizable template that supports advertising spots
• Ability to send e-mail to all users without an article
• First version will use PHP mail() function

There’s a new thread for those who want to help him refine the feature set for this first version. I’m looking forward to seeing this develop; it’s something that would even be useful in our publishing 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.

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.

Around the Network

The discussion of advertising rates continued this week. Brad Arendt approaches the issue of click-throughs and identifies two issues: finding the proper tool to accurately count click-throughs and take down the ad when the limit had been reached, as well as educating your local business owner on the concept so that it doesn’t discount the “value in brand awareness.” In fact, Bryan Murley argues that costs per clicks are a “horrible idea for college media sites, akin to allowing advertisers to only pay for print ads per the number of coupons that are brought in from an ad.” He’s more interested in looking into selling against user engagement with the site, based on such metrics as the amount of time spent on the site.

Also, Mo Jangda reported in the forum that he’s published a better version of the Co-Authors WordPress Plugin.

On the wiki, there’s now excellent information and background on the Tulane Hullabaloo website, Miles started a new page on editing WordPress themes, and Daniel started a page on tools for measuring engagement

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):

• A reputation economy is a good model for comments – Mark Briggs thinks you should tie a reputation system to commenting. If you take it one step further and assign semantic data to the comments, you could come up with a very interesting database of information.
• Rebooting the News podcast for April 19 – Excellent discussion between Dave Winer and Jay Rosen on the future of news. Of particular interest is Dave’s observation that the newspaper industry is going through the first revolution that the tech industry has already gone through more than a dozen times. Jay also introduces an idea for open news assignments that I think has legs.
• Measuring user engagement: Lessons from BusinessWeek – Great post by Eric Ulken on how BusinessWeek measures user engagement on their website. It’s time to understand traffic better than uniques and pageviews.
• Sesh Ideas for BCNI Philly – A couple of ideas for what to discuss at BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly.

Website Design

We went with the Gazette Edition from WooThemes because it gave us all the basic capabilities we were looking for:

• Prominent ads
• Wigetized sidebar
• Slick, rotating slideshow
• Auto-generated thumbnails

Advertising

During a time when revenue is falling, having full control over priority ad space is a must. We have a top banner (468 x 60 pixels), a sidebar ad (300 x 250 pixels) and up to four square ads on the lower sidebar (125 x 125 pixels).

We installed a WordPress plugin that allows for a “page peel” style advertisement in the top corner of the site. Although probably annoying to some, people like playing with it.

Plugins Used

The following plugins give us functionality that College Publisher would never allow for (or at least not easily).

Twitter Tools lets us easily post new articles and tweets straight from the admin end of WordPress. Why this is great: We don’t have to give every reporter the Twitter password and it streamlines the process of tweeting a new article. Posting links to articles is acceptable in moderation and when it’s supplemented with plenty of converstaion.

WP-Touch generates a mobile version of our site. If you don’t have a smart phone, you might not care, but this fall at Cal Poly, six hundred students on campus used iPhones — 500 more than in the spring, according to Ryan Matteson, the university’s technical security officer. My point: mobile is on the rise.

Another mobile plugin we’re excited about is for the non-smart phone users who want to get SMS updates. SMS Text Message is a plug we’re excited about, but have yet to use. It allows users to subscribe for text message alerts and lets us send out those alerts from the dashboard.

We’re using the Add to Any plugin for users to share our content over any social network. Although Share This is more widely recognizing for sharing, I chose Add to Any because it lets us customize the look of the button.

Structural Changes to the Daily

On a CICM post, I briefly mentioned the structural changes that came with the switch. To elaborate, this is how our workflow will function from here on out:

• Reporters save their articles as a WordPress draft (instead of e-mailing articles to editors)
• The reporter contacts copy editors when the article is in the CMS, copy editors will edit from the newroom or home (wherever they happen to be)
• We’ve hired an additional copy editor and switched up the shifts so there is always a copy editor on-call during the day
• There is an ongoing Google Spreadsheet of most recent articles posted. After editing the article, the copy editor signs off on the article on the spreadsheet
• The third editor to read over the story pushes “publish” if they think it’s ready. If it still needs work, it can go through the process again
• In the evening, designers pull already-edited articles from WordPress for page layout

The delay time between when a reporter writes the article and the editor posts it is about four hours. Right now, it’s not to efficient because our reporters are new (and therefore their articles need much editing) and the workflow is still slow. It will only get better from here.

The Back End

The hierarchy is broken down as such:

• Three administrators (not including CoPress) who have full access to all features
• About ten editors who can publish articles
• Ten contributors (reporters) who can save drafts, but not publish

New Features

Although we certainly didn’t need WordPress to implement the following new features to our website, having WordPress has made it way easier to execute these ideas we’ve had:

• Crime map: WordPress pages make adding new, easily-accessible features very easy. Within a few minutes, we were able to throw together a Google Map of the police log that we plan to update daily.
• Hot topics: We’ve always wanted to re-ignite an old feature called “What’s the Buzz?” but creating and maintaining pages was always a headache. Again, within minutes we were able to generate pages around controversial issues on our campus. Eventually, we’ll have a wiki to supplement each topic.

What’s Next?

Now that the process of posting is more streamlined (or, it’s getting there), the goal is to produce better multimedia. My efforts can be focused on training reporters one-on-one instead of copying and pasting articles at the end of the night.

Around the Network

In the forum this week, Greg asked about strategies for making your print edition an online feature. The idea came out of a Twitter conversation between Greg and Dane Beavers at The Oklahoma Daily, and the specific questions were:

• After you complete a print edition, do you put a PDF or other such version of it online? Why or not?
• If you do, is it useful? What kind of traffic does it get?
• If you do, do you upload as a PDF or using a third-party service such as Issuu or Scribd?
• If you do, do you tell advertisers that their ads are viewable online?

The most common tool for putting PDFs online mentioned in the conversation was Issuu. Although Lauren doesn’t like the idea because she feels it “defeats the purpose of the web site”, Mo argues that it’s “absolutely important to post the print edition online. Biggest reason: archiving.” He gets requests from all number of people for past issues and having “digital copies of the paper makes it a lot easier, and plus, it’s searchable through Google (even copies as old as 50 years, with proper digital scanning and OCR).” Another good point from Mo for using Issuu instead of hosting on your own site: “you save on bandwidth costs, because the PDFs tend to add up and swallow your monthly usage (lately we’ve been looking at ~50MB per 36-page issue).”

On the wiki, Joey added a bunch of information about the Daily Orange’s brand-new blog network, including setup (they’re using WordPress MU) and plugins. I’m personally looking forward to reading a blog post about the WordPress MU configuration process, and their strategies for expanding engagement.

Congratulations to Jon Schleuss for being hired to the Web Developer position at the Arkansas Traveler.

In the News

Four links you should have clicked on in the past week and should instead read, watch or listen to this weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• TWiT 184: Hard Times for Hard Copy – The tech pundit take on the newspaper industry. Want perspective? This is perspective.
• GooseGrade Brings Citizen Editing to WordPress Blogs – Plugin released that allows your community to submit copy edits for your review. We’ve installed it on this blog if you’d like to try it out; the widget should be located in the lower right. 30 second review: I really like the idea, but you shouldn’t be required to authenticate in my opinion.
• Five ideas for display ads – Pretty decent ideas for improving online engagement with display advertising. The best one, in my opinion, is to make the advertisement a part of a CAPTCHA so that the reader is required to read it.
• Liberia’s Blackboard Blogger – Erik Hersman (AKA White African) interviews Alfred Sirleaf, an “analog blogger.” Mainstream news organizations could learn a lot from this guy (read the article for the full deal):

Liberia’s Blackboard Blogger from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.