CoPress

Edit Flow was bumped up to v0.3 last week and saw a flurry of other updates as bugs cropped up that we managed to miss during the testing phase before release. The main focus of this release was to introduce usergroups, which will form the basis of future features and to enhance the notification functionality that was introduced in the previous version.

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?

Last Thursday a few of us gathered to talk about the development projects that will be seeing heavy work over the winter break. Max Cutler, Andrew Dunn, Will, Daniel, and Lauren joined me for a half hour conversation covering the various projects that we are all working on. The full audio is attached at the bottom of the post and here are some highlights of what we talked about.

Nando

First up Max gave us an update on where development on Nando stands. As Lauren mentioned last week, Nando is the administrative side of the Courant News CMS. Max and Rob Baskin will be developing the templates for the interface and I’ll be working with them on designing the user interface and experience. The project is in the early stages right now but wireframes for the interface will be released soon so stay tuned to the Google Group for updates.

Edit Flow

Daniel also recapped what will be happening with Edit Flow over break. Work will be ramping up on version 0.3 of the plugin which will include more granular control over email notifications and user groups. Other features include some bug fixes as well as visualizing posts through a calendar-like interface.

Courier

Will Davis also filled us in on some of the work that will be done on Courier, his plugin for better email notifications. Courier already has support for custom templates and will be gaining further subscription options. The plugin update should be released before the end of break so stay tuned for updates.

Tar Heel iPhone app

Finally, Andrew Dunn talked a bit about The Daily Tar Heel’s iPhone app that he announced on Thursday. The app includes their Housing Guide as well as all the news, classifieds, and radio that you’d expect. It also has a feature that Andrew talked about on the call: a drink specials mini-app.

To hear more about all of the above projects listen to the full audio below.

Hacking the Student Newsroom Session #3 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (881)

When news that a Cal Poly student had gone missing hit the Mustang Daily newsroom, editors knew they had a big story on their hands. The next morning when the student’s bike was found at the base of a local mountain, the implications for the story were larger. The editors were on the cusp of a breaking news story and a potentially huge influx of traffic.

Then a body was found. And like clockwork, the traffic spiked.

Was the Mustang Daily prepared? Strategically, yes. They had five editors on the scene of the incident. Technically? Perhaps not. Their site went down for a few minutes (and was quickly fixed when CoPress received the notification). Here are a few steps the editors could have taken to prepare. (Full disclosure: one of the authors of this post, Lauren Rabaino, is a former editor of the Mustang Daily.)

1. Keep your site delivering the story

When you’re about to break major news, you will need to prepare your Web site for the upcoming onslaught of traffic. If you’re using WordPress, that will mean making your site as static as possible. WP Super Cache contains a feature known as Lock Down that allows you to make your site completely static — in other words, posts will be saved as flat HTML files, dramatically decreasing server load and dramatically increasing the chance that when someone visits your Web site, they’ll be served something other than an error. There are two drawbacks to using Lock Down that you should know about up front:

• Comments will not show up until the page is refreshed, either manually or by turning off Lock Down.
• Updates to stories will not be pushed without dumping the cache manually.

These, however, are small prices to pay for making sure visitors can read the article at all.

If you don’t have WP Super Cache installed already, you should — it smoothes over spikes in traffic and reduces server load even when it isn’t in Lock Down mode.

To enable Lock Down mode, go to Settings -> WP Super Cache.

Near the bottom of the page, you will see a button to enable Lock Down mode.

At the top of the page, you will see an option to Delete Expired and Delete Cache. If you update one of your articles or want newer comments to show on the page, you will have to hit Delete Cache.

If you are a CoPress client and you expect a huge spike in traffic, let us know ahead of time and we’ll be around to actively monitor your site and keep it delivering pageviews.

2. Make sure your article gets read

Google News is a great way to gain traffic, especially when big news breaks. If your site isn’t already on Google News, or if your site is incompatible with Google News, fixing any problems and submitting your site for review should be the first step of optimizing your Web site.

When updating the story, the decision about whether to do a write-thru or post a new story goes a long way toward driving traffic to your site. Google News will not re-index a news story after it has been published, even if you use a sitemap generator like Google XML Sitemaps. Therefore, if there is any sort of a major development in the story, and certainly if there is one big enough to warrant a change of headline, it is imperative the article is put into a new post for SEO.

Targeting your regular readership is also important. Plugins like SMS Text Message and Courier allow you to quickly and easily notify your readers when news breaks or when there are updates.   Be sure to use keywords in your tweets so anyone going to search.twitter.com can find your updates. For developing news, create a new #hashtag related to the topic for readers to follow throughout your coverage for example (#missingstudent or #polydeath).

Twitter can be an easy way to notify readers, but by far the best social networking site for you to focus on is Facebook. If there is a Facebook page or group concerning the news, post a link to your Web site. Have your reporters post links on their walls and Twitter accounts. Together, these two mediums can drive hundreds or thousands of visitors to your Web site. For example, the day news broke about the student suicide at Cal Poly, more than half of the Mustang Daily’s pageviews for the day were referred from Facebook (56.6 percent, to be exact).

All these strategies should be deployed within minutes of the article’s post. If you are one of the first media organizations to report on the news, you need to hook as many readers as possible and convince them that your newspaper is the ultimate source on this subject. This is only possible if they learn about it first from you.

When you update the article — which you should do, frequently — or when a big update comes in that warrants a new article — which should happen, though with less frequency — be sure to let your readers know. Don’t spam your readers, but find a point right before they start feeling harassed when they’ll be grateful for keeping you informed.

Finally, if you are expecting you might create a new story when a big enough update comes in, link your homepage on Facebook and in e-mails instead of the story itself, so when readers visit the site they see the newest news first. Also, when you create a new story, it is a good idea to link to it at the top of the old one.

3. Develop an editorial strategy

The best way to break news is to have a game plan in place so you’re not scrounging for reporters and photographers at the last minute. Here are a few steps you might want to try:

• Designate a breaking news “leader.” This person can be in charge of delegating responsibilities to reporters and photographers when news breaks and posting Twitter and Facebook updates throughout the day.
• Have a breaking news emergency kit. The worst thing that can happen when news breaks is that the video camera is checked out or the batteries are dead. If you have the resources to do so, keep a spare camera, tripod and batteries in the newsroom solely for breaking news purposes
• Know the workflow. You don’t have to have a multi-sourced, 500-word article before posting updates to your site and Twitter. Break news as it happens and get your staff into the mindset of posting breaking news nuggets as it happens. Updates can always come later.
• Listen to your readers. Breaking news is perhaps one of the best opportunities to use reader feedback while reporting. Let your readers submit their questions and tips via social media so you can integrate it into the reporting process. If the breaking news event is a scene (fire, protest, etc.), seek user-submitted photos and video.

This guest post is both an update on our previous coverage of Connect2Mason and the first in our new series about innovative models of interest to college media sites.

George Mason University has an interesting community; with many of the students living off-campus or attending classes at one of the four satellite campuses, finding a way to reach out to and work with them can be difficult. We are always looking at what’s going on online to figure out which tools can help us best.

With that in mind, we’ve launched two websites, Mason Votes and onMason, in the past year and a half. We’re also in the midst of a second redesign of Connect2Mason, our convergence website which pulls content from all of our other student media outlets. We’ve also been pretty serious about expanding our social media presence to cover the needs of our diverse community.

onMason

At the beginning of this semester we launched a new site called onMason. During the last two years, we’ve noticed that a lot of students are out there, blogging, sending pictures from their phones to the web and creating websites. We felt that we were missing a serious opportunity to bring student-created media to the forefront because, even though we run searches, there’s always going to be a huge amount of stuff we’re going to miss.

Read more →

WordCamp NYC 2009 — a two-day, community-organized conference held at Baruch College of the City University of New York — offered a lot of inspiring sessions on how people and organizations are using WordPress, WordPressMU, BuddyPress and BBPress to manage content and build communities.

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.

Recommended links for the weekend:

• A course idea pitched to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University: a journalism entrepreneurship class with a twist. The school would create a corporation that invested in the student’s projects in exchange for 70% ownership. They’d help incubate the business with the eventual goal of selling the successful ones.
• Primer on how to curate content on the web, instead of just moderating user generated content (tks Megan!)
• Four developers make up 25% of the recently-launched Texas Tribune’s staff. This will be a site to watch for sweet projects. (Related - TexasTribune: Our amazing site developers would want us to add– this site could not have been coded in 3 wks without #django.)
• In the forum, Joe Cefoli explains how display the images for Gazette’s media slider after the Javascript loads. Also, Will asks whether a plugin to manage home page templates would be useful. I think it could, but the news organizations need multiple home page templates to begin with. Andrew points out that the news organizations might be more likely to design different homepage templates if it didn’t require technical expertise to switch them on the fly.
• Shameless self-promotion: CoPress had a pretty terrific write-up of our progress to date on Poynter on Monday, and I had the fortune to join Joe Cefoli of The Fairfield Mirror on a WordPress Tavern podcast this week to talk about their migration and relaunch.

Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.

In terms of scale and scope, Election Day is consistently one of the biggest stories of the year. Generally presidential election years receive the most attention, and most newspapers depend on wire services to provide the results.

This year, Maine’s ballot contained a referendum to overturn a law allowing same-sex marriage. The turnout was immense (60 percent, more than double the usual turnout in an off year) and we wanted to make sure we had our own, unique coverage. The Maine Campus had been following the run-up to the election closely, and we were committed to providing up-to-the-moment coverage. We were able to avoid wire reports using easily acquired tools larger news orgs haven’t adopted yet.

We used a plugin for WordPress called Live Blogging to quickly and easily add updates to a single page. The plugin allowed two reporters to collaborate at different locations without worrying about overwriting posts and gave readers a single page to come back to to receive updates. It also tweeted (and re-tweeted) our updates so our Twitter readers could follow along.

Our updates went out faster and more frequently than larger news organizations updated their Web sites. One news organization even used our reporting to decide whether or not to call the close election.

When WordPress really showed its true colors, though, was when one of the organizations decided to declare victory. Within minutes we had written and posted a brief to the Web site. It was only a matter of seconds to reconfigure the front page and send out a breaking news e-mail. Other proprietary content management systems would not have allowed us to report with the ease and speed at which we did.

Larger news organizations have advantages of money and larger staffs, but The Maine Campus had an advantage that allowed us to scoop them on one of the biggest stories of the year: WordPress.

Today was the last day of the 2009 ACP/CMA Conference in Austin, TX and this morning the winners of the annual “Best in Show” awards were named. You can view the full list on the ACP website.

We want to extend a very special congratulations to the College Heights Herald, winner of the best Publication Website among large schools.

This past Thursday we ran the first of what will become a bi-weekly series. We’re calling it “Hacking the Student Newsroom.” Each session will lead you through a specific skill related to WordPress and college news that you can implement immediately. We’ll also do our best to record the workshops for those who can’t make the scheduled date. This week’s session was on setting up a sandbox in WordPress.

A sandbox provides a great test environment where you can experiment with both ideas and code without having to worry about breaking things. Your Web staff and any others that are interested in learning about WordPress can also use a sandbox to teach themselves some great new skills.

We covered everything from creating a subdomain for a sandbox to the proper way to configure your development version of WordPress. For those who want a test site to test edits that will be made to the production site, we went over how to transfer your theme and plugin files so that everything is as similar as possible.

On the wiki, we started a cheat sheet of how to set up your own sandbox. We’ll be adding to it, and you’re more than welcome to contribute as well.

Recommended links for the weekend:

• Columbia Daily Spectacle (UPDATED) – Details on what went down at the Columbia Spectator over last weekend. Frustrated with the leadership of the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor, the Online Editor decided to take the site offline until a list of demands had been met.
• WordPress 2.8.5: Hardening Release – Minor security updates including a fix for a Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently affecting a subset of users. You should probably upgrade as soon as possible.
• What does a mobile journalist need? – Paul Bradshaw streams a class on mobile journalism, and lists hardware, software, systems, and mindset required for mobile journalism. (tks Megan Taylor)
• How To Use Your Custom Yourls Shortener with Tweetie 2 – Simple tutorial on how to use your self-hosted URL shortener with Tweetie 2. Yourls is a slick piece of software for hosting your own URL shortener.
• Jonathan Pichot at the Campus Chronicle is looking for the best plugin for Facebook Connect and any tips for implementation.
• News Orgs Make Gradual Progress in Site Navigation, Use of Social Networks – Ken Sands walks through design considerations of recent changes to the Washington Post, Toronto Star, and Spokesman-Review. Ryan Pitts at the Spokesman-Review seems to be doing the most radical rethink of navigation; it would be interesting to know whether they’re tracking user interaction and iterating based on usage.
• Max Cutler and Robert Baskin have been doing a bit of work on Courant News today, including finishing up powerful search functionality I’ve gotten to take a peak at and building an “elegant way to vary site display based on User-Agent or other HTTP headers.”
• Announcing Managing News: A Pluggable News & Data Aggregator – The code is in open beta and available for download. The key selling point to this product seems to be that you can import data from multiple sources, run persistent searches across the incoming data, and visualize it on a map.

Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.