A few weeks ago, a group of college news web editors and a couple of advisers got together to discuss content management systems. The result is CoPress.
From the about page:
Student newspapers, at colleges and universities, fare no better than the pros. In fact, they’re generally worse off. Few student publications have much technical talent at all on staff, and what they do have is spread very thin. Most are stuck with bad content management systems — either clunky commercial products or simple blogging tools — that take much hacking and “programming” to fit the complex needs of a modern news Web site. As a result, developers spend inordinate effort fighting their CMSes, leaving minimal time to innovate on top of the platforms or build engaging online material. To date, most publications have struggled individually to reinvent the wheel.
They’re trying to reinvent the wheel with a new cms. Per the comments, Daniel Bachhuber points out that they’re not developing a new cms, but trying to gather info to make an informed decision on a cms. Read his comment for more explanation. That’s a tall order, but it’s an interesting development that sprung from the ground up.
They are in the process of collecting data from a survey of college newspaper web sites. Be sure and contribute to the data set if you are an adviser or an editor for your college newspaper. Follow the developments on the web site.
on Sep 29th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
I’d like to clarify that we aren’t necessarily building a new CMS. There are a number of options already out there. Instead, we’re identifying the options out there and will be auditing them according to criteria we’re developing. From that, we’ll hopefully make a community decision on which platform to adopt, and then work together as a community to make it a legit solution for student news organizations. Plugin development will certainly be a component of this, but it is our sincere hope not to have to build another CMS.
on Sep 29th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
I’m looking forward to seeing how this develops. I know my paper, at least, definitely needs a new CMS.
As far as college paper CMSes go, good things might come out of Populous, one of the Knight Challenge winners.
on Sep 29th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
We’re very interested in Populous too, but unfortunately haven’t heard from them in a while.