Switching from College Publisher
This page is the definitive how-to for switching from College Publisher to an open source content management system.
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Leaving College Publisher
If your news organization is on a contract with College Publisher (CP), you must submit 90 days' written termination notice from the publisher or editor in chief. The notice can be mailed to:
MTV Networks on Campus 1540 Broadway, 33rd floor New York, NY 10036
It can also be faxed to (212) 654-7285.
You will have to separately request your archives, domain name, subscriber list and anything else you may want, such as comments. You will have to submit a privacy policy to CP before they will give you access to your subscriber list. Also, be sure to ask for just your subscribers, otherwise they might give you anyone who's ever signed up to use your Web site.
College Publisher doesn't always format archives the same, so you can probably request certain fields be included. For example, you might want to request CP include the post date and time instead of the issue date and time, so breaking news won't be predated. Also, CP will only perform an export once, so be sure you are clear the first time and be sure you post any new articles after the export into your new CMS.
To request your domain name, you will first have to pick a registrar and initiate the transfer from there. Namecheap is a reliable, low-cost option. When you initiate the transfer you will also have to submit a request to CP for your domain name. Generally the whole transfer process takes a few days.
Check your media files against your database — they might not all be there, depending on how long you've been with CP. CP might or might not be able to correct the problem.
From our experience, College Publisher will give you access to your archives within 4-6 weeks of receiving notice.
Setting up your new website
There are a whole number of steps you'll want to take to account when launching your new website. A more basic outline includes:
- Ensuring that you can get control of your domain and will have access to your archives
- Installing a development sandbox where you can get your site design where you want it
- Teaching staff how to use the new site and altering workflow accordingly
Migrating your database to WordPress
There are several people around the nation who have migrated all of their old College Publisher 4 content to WordPress. If you use CoPress' services, they will perform the migration for you, among other things. A CP import plugin exists for people who want a streamlined do-it-yourself process, and more advanced users might want to use a PHP script, such as the one here, to generate an XML file. It is not well recommended to import the CP database directly into WP's.
The following newspapers have published in-depth accounts of switching from CP to WP:
Designing your site
Extensive documentation of the WordPress functions is available at codex.wordpress.org. The codex is extremely useful when developing your site's template.
There are also many themes available for WordPress. CoPress clients are able to pick a premium theme, such as a WooTheme for free, or have CoPress design a site for a fee. It is highly recommended you customize your Web site extensively if you use a pre-built theme.
Issue-based paradigm is gone
Instead of being categorized by issue, articles are now strictly categorized by the date and time posted. An important benefit is that you can now publish breaking news that won't be associated with an issue from the past. Most of your content will be listed chronologically, unless you use plugins to sort articles such as WP Sticky.
The email edition
The most-used e-mail plugin for WordPress is called MailPress. MailPress is stable and automated but not very customizable, and might not be well-suited for newspapers. A new plugin named Courier is aimed directly at managing the e-mail edition of newspapers and is in use by many large newspapers.
There are also many third-party services that specialize e-mail distribution, including MadMimi, MailChimp and Constant Contact. Such services are not tied to WordPress, so creating e-mails can often be tedious.
No matter what avenue you go plugin-wise, you can always customize your e-mail edition's template. It is relatively simple with both plugins to add advertisements.
