Tulane Hullabaloo
| Frequency | Weekly |
|---|---|
| University | [[uaffiliation::Tulane University]] |
| Financial income | Advertising revenue |
| Online editor | Will Van Wazer |
| Staff | Fewer than 50. |
| Headquarters | Room 25 Tulane University Center New Orleans, LA 70118 |
| Circulation | 4,000 |
| Web site | http://thehullabaloo.com |
| CMS | WordPress |
The Tulane Hullabaloo is the weekly paper of Tulane University. We are completely independent, meaning we get absolutely no student activity fees and are completely run on advertising (which means other than advertising staff, no one is paid).
Currently run by: Will Van Wazer, Online Editor. will@willvanwazer.com
Background Story
To start this story, it is important to note that overall, the size of our staff is less than 50. Also, there is one person who does Online stuff, and that is the Online Editor.
We had gone into this school year planning to transition from our old website (College Publisher 4.0) to something new. What that was yet, we had no idea. Our Network Administrator mentioned that he had a lot of experience with Drupal, and thought it was a good platform for us to use. He and the Online Editor (which is me, if you haven't figured that out yet) met weekly for 2 months planning everything about the website. We also canceled our contract with College Publisher.
When the second semester started, the website was supposed to be completely coded, and the Online Editor was supposed to worry about the design of it, and focus on getting on new content. Of course, the Network Administrator decided it wasn't worth his time, and stopped working for us without doing any of the work.
This left us in a particularly bad predicament--lose a website, or come up with something in about 3 weeks or so before the February 2nd deadline when the contract with College Publisher was supposed to end. The Online Editor remembered a post by some people from the Miami Hurricane, and so he decided to go with Wordpress.
After 2 weeks, we had a website very similar to the one currently up in a test phase. Due to some domain name problems with College Publisher, we did not go live until last week (March 13th). Also, we went live in the process of publishing an issue, so there was no time for the website to be in a beta phase--it just had to work, and within about 5 hours. And it did, at least so far.
It came as a real shock to the Online Editor to be a Online Pacemaker finalist, and he remembered something about applying for that after seeing it while browsing the web drunk one night at 4 am.
Plugins and Theme
We use the Branford Magazine theme. We run a seriously excessive amount of plugins, but here we go:
Advanced Category Excluder: The theme requires us to have a featuredarticles category, as well as a leadstory category. We don't want these showing up elsewhere.
Akismet: To de-spam comments.
All in One Adsense and YPN: For the ads on the website. This is espcially good for putting ads in posts.
Audit Trail: to keep track of what people do, so if someone messes it up we know who it was.
Awsom News Announcement: to post the red banner like breaking news stuff you see on the website now.
cforms: for letters to the editor.
Dagon Design Import Users: to import multipe users.
Do-follow: really only cause someone posted about it, but it eliminates the no-follow atribute.
FD Feedburner Plugin: to burn our feeds.
FV Community News: to allow user submissions of news onto our site. This is a great plugin.
Google Analyticator: Google Analytics
Issue Manager: Something similar to the College Publisher workflow, this allows us to put each of our print edition articles into a category for that issue, then publish all of them at the same time.
Mail Press: even though I can't get it to work.
Open ID: really because we can, and no other reason.
Peter's Post Notes: see the next plugin for more
Peter's Collaboration Emails: vital for us. We have restricted each writer to be a contributor as far as wordpress is concerned, meaning they cant submit posts. This plugin allows us to have, when a writer submits a post to a category, to notify the editors of that section. Its wonderful. The Post Notes stuff allows the editor to send it back with notes, like this sucks rewrite it.
Share This: Sharing of posts. Best one I've found.
WP-CMS Post Control: eleminates some of the boxes for writers, so they don't get confused.
WP-Cumulus: the tag cloud is pretty damn sexy.
WP-Polls: best for polls.
Wp-typogriphy: don't actually remember why we use this. Something about fonts that I don't really get, but I put it up.
WP-Calais Archive Tagger: when this gets updated, it will go thru our archive and tag every post with relevant stuff. Really cool.
WP-Super Cache: most important plugin on the entire site. Makes it load much faster.
