Reminder: If your college media outlet redesigned its web site this summer, e-mail me at scmurley -at-gmail.com, or drop a comment below to be included in this series. (Previous posts here, here, here, and here)

The Maine Campus redesigned on a WordPress CMS, moving from College Publisher v. 4.

Editor William Davis writes:

I designed the new template from scratch and am also working on several plugins to help news orgs use WordPress. One plugin I just released is Courier, which handles e-mail editions (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/courier/). I also wrote a custom classifieds management program (http://classifieds.mainecampus.com), and am working on a program to integrate WordPress and InDesign. I’ve been talking with CoPress a lot, who have helped me promote Courier, and our redesign was featured in the ‘This Week in CoPress’ podcast.

With the new site, we’re looking to take The Campus web-first. The program I’m developing will allow us to use WordPress as a pagination tool for our print edition. Writers will post drafts to the site and we will be able to approve the article for immediate online publication if it’s a news articles or drag it into our print edition if it’s an article we hold, such as a feature or an opinion article.

The new site will allow us to dramatically expand our multimedia offerings — we’re already planning live streams of health care forums we’re sponsoring, for example — and we’re launching a new feature called Campus Currents that is akin to The New York Times’ Times Topics. The new site also features a mobile version.

The Circuit at Wartburg College redesigned earlier this year using dotnetnuke (a product I had not heard of previously). This semester, they are working on expanding the site. Circuit Manager Spencer Albers mentioned in a comment:

Last year we started The Circuit (www.wartburgcircuit.org) and became the online home of the schools newspaper, the Trumpet.  We worked hard to build a good following online for the newspaper.  In January we launched a redesign of the site to offer weekly webcasts and webisodes on multiple topics.  We also become the home site of many projects around campus and hosted varied content like student senate election coverage and a special reporting on a campus wide protest.

This year we are moving forward and becoming a more converged media website.  We are working on incorporating the radio station KWAR and our TV statioin WTV8 into a single web platform.  Each media will have their own personalized site within The Circuit.  The Circuit’s main goal now is to act as a portal to all of this information and become a starting point for students on the web.

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