College newspaper site powered by WP

Bryan, in firefox 2.0.0.3 on Windows XP Pro, the title text and the date are behind the page tabs at the top. Otherwise, very nice!

How has the administration and content management/production side gone with WP? Just curious.

Hi wittmania. I’m using FireFox 2.0.0.3 on Windows XP Pro and it looks normal to me!

On the production end, it’s been amazing. I went from a manually updated Web site with static content to an awesome web-based control panel and database backend with dynamically-served content. It’s been great. It used to take me 4hrs+ to load the newspaper, now it takes me about 1 hour and I have more time to devote to Web exclusives.

Image management is tough though. I need to find some good image plug-ins.

Hello Brian,

Any chance you could send me some of the necessary code to duplicate some of the features you managed to create with the skin? I am trying to learn programming/CMS/web dev work and really like the way your CMS is laid out. Would love to play around with it and see how everything fits together.

Thanks,

Paul

Brian, any chance of sharing this design with the group? I know that I would LOVE to have this for our golf site.

Thanks,

chuck

This theme is great! Any way to get a theme like this? I need something for my school paper as well…

Brian, I could REALLY use your help.
I run the site called YOUTHinkLeft.com
its a communal blog for politically active teens.
Would you mind sending me a ZIP with all of the needed files?
I will leave credit to you.

~Brendon Schweers

I must say, your site is really impressive. You have found a way to put alot of information on the front page without that overloaded feeling.

I like it!

I’m working on my school (Swarthmore’s) daily newspaper website, and we’ve taken a bit of a different tact.

It isn’t finished yet (will be officially open for business in Sept) and has some bugs (posts are displaying improperly and IE hates it), but otherwise is slowly nearing completion…

https://www.arador.org/gazette/ (the ‘real’ site is daily.swarthmore.edu . It sucks.)

Bryan, any way you are willing to share the code for the following anymore:
https://collegian.csufresno.edu./

I would definitely love to hear from you as I’m trying to work on something similar in my area.

Thanks! -N

Great job on your newspaper website. It really shows that wordpress can be used for much more than just a blog.

Hello all.

I am hailing from NYU – I am the recently appointed web editor for Washington Square News.

Thank You Bryan for posting your site, it is much needed inspiration. I can’t stand the College Publisher Network and have been working like crazy to try and figure out a solid pitch to transition from it.

I have a couple questions about your experience with wordpress on a full functioning newspaper though.

Mainly – how is the back end? How many people are working on the paper? WSN has about 60 people working at different intervals and I am worried about updating.

If we went with wordpress we would probably only grant editors permission to post articles so that could help.

Also, how is the WP bandwith load? how much do you pay a month?

Any general advice for the transition? Mistakes you made the last time.

Another paper you guys might want to check out that has an outstanding design is https://theithacan.org/ – I was very impressed. They don’ t seem to have any ads though so that always makes papers look better.

but anyways man, just thought I would say thanks for the inspiration.

rock on.

-cody

Hi Cody. I too can not stand CollegePublisher. That’s what inspired me to look for other CMS solutions and finally deciding on WordPress.

We have a staff of about 40 people, the paper publishes only three times a week. But the web department is extremely small. It was just me for two and a half years. When we launched our new site with dynamic content they hired one assistant. Next semester there will be four people.

Content is published via WP by the web dept. We have six editors from the print side who have access to WP, but they don’t post their own sections yet. Hopefully that’ll happen in the future. Currently they just do minor editing, and maybe post a blog once and a while. Our writers are not given access at all.

The site is hosted on the university’s servers, which are managed by the ITS department. So I don’t have access to bandwidth info. But we get around 20,000 to 30,000 unique visits per month and the ITS dept has never complained about load.

Bryan, I’m curious about how you handle the article’s writers. Have you created an account for every writer have whoever is posting the article manually change the author? Some custom plugin? What about if there are multiple authors for an article?
Cheers,
-Sam

We create an account for every writer, even though none of the accounts are actually used. It’s simply the easiest way to identify the writers, plus we can have a dedicated page for each writer that lists all of their articles. However… it means we end up with a ton of accounts. And multiple authors for one article complicates things. I’d rather have a custom field or some kind of plug-in that makes this easier, but I haven’t found anything yet.

I assume by your “not answering” of the question that you have no intention of releasing for free or paid the theme which you are using?

I know many would be willing to pay, including myself.

Let us know.

Either way, well done, the site is excellent!