It’s official. After months of beta testing and questions, College Publisher is finally rolling out the new 5.0 release. Among the first is the Daily 49er at Cal State-Long Beach. Colleen Donnell, editor-in-chief, writes:

I’d like to officially welcome you to the new Daily Forty-Niner website. It’s been in the works since winter but thanks to a wonderful group of people including staffers, advisers and the team at College Publisher, we’re running live. I couldn’t be more excited. We are the first school to launch with CP5.

For history’s sake, I should note that Boise State’s Arbiter has been the “beta” school for a while, so they were working out the kinks before the 49er came along. Also first out of the gate with the new system is the Kansas State Collegian.

The Daily Eastern News is scheduled to get upgraded this month, so I’ll have more to say after we get a look at the whole enchilada.

The Daily 49er Editor’s Blog “blog” doesn’t seem to have a permalink for the comment above, which means I can’t link directly to Colleen’s comments.

Most of you know I have been testing the new 5.0 or polopoly version for College Publisher going on 4 months. I have been getting many emails and questions at the conventions about what it is like but by far the biggest question that gets put to me is in the vien of “we are thinking of switching but want to know what the new 5.0 system has to offer before we jump ship.” Note, this isn’t a direct quote from any one just a general wording.

I think since the problems of the “j run errors” many advisors and students are frustrated with CP and that is why many are looking at other options. Additionally, we all have probably attended or followed sessions on “new media” and our students now want to try some of these great things we have all learned about. Things which may not be easy to do, if possible at all under the current 4.0 system.

At the core however, I feel many advisors are over looking some key points. I quickly broke down what I see as positives and negatives for the CP system. This is a short list and by no means complete. Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments section.

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Polopoly has been acquired by Atex, a player in the north american newspaper market.  They have a large list of clients not only in the US but all around the world.

Atex put out a release on the acquisition. They also discuss the view of Polopoly working within the Atex organization.

Being involved as the first school to beta test the new College Publisher 5.0, or Polopoly system, I have found there is a real need to get more feedback from other papers to see what they would like in the new system. I also hope this will be a good platform to keep people updated on what is new in the Polopoly system.

I also want to make no promises for those grammarians out there. I am going for the updated content vs best written content. Sometimes you may get ramblings which unto themselves make no sense but hopefully in context of this blog will read coherently.

Let’s get started…

One of the new, and actual working features in Polopoly is XML upload of your paper. This is a huge time saver but takes some planning.

What is XML?

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Announced today on the College Publisher blog, the partnership between College Publisher and Roo, a video network, is ending in March:

Due to changing needs of multi-media presentation from our partners and the evolution of web technology for video, we have decided to transition away from ROO video players to our own solution. At the end of March, the ROO video players will be not be displayed on CMN newspaper sites.

The partnership didn’t last long. It was announced at the end of April, 2007. We never used the Roo system at the Daily Eastern News, but if I were using it, I’d be a little bit miffed that they are pulling out of the web sites in the middle of the school year.

CP is rolling out a new version of its publishing platform, using the Polopoly Content Management System, which is supposed to include a built-in video platform that will allow users to put video content anywhere on their site. The big caveat, as mentioned in the CP blog post cited above, is that the solution they have doesn’t transcode video files into Flash (.flv) format.

What that means is that if you are using iMovie to produce a video, you can upload your .mov file to the CP system, but unlike, say, YouTube, that video won’t be transcoded into Flash format. Why would that be important? Quicktime movies are broadly supported, but Flash movies (.flv) are supported by many more browsers (according to Adobe statistics, fwiw).

So your options are to encode your own Flash movie, using the Flash video encoder, or use another transcoding service. And for folks who were using Roo (I don’t know how many there are), you’ll need to find another stop-gap measure to get through the semester.

YouTube is one option. Blip.tv is a second option that we’ve used at CICM. In some ways, using an outside service to host your videos can be a good thing, since it will give your student videos a much wider audience than if the videos were just placed on your own web site.

I wrote about the Roo Ingest video upload feature in June of 2007.

Here’s a video of folks from the Miami Hurricane (that’s the one in Florida, btw), discussing how they’re redesigning their web presence and moving off College Publisher. (via Greg Linch)

Way back in October, we wrote about College Publisher’s new content management system - Polopoly. At the end of January, apparently it became “official,” as announced by the Polopoly website and Editor & Publisher.

The Polopoly announcement said the new CMS would be rolled out “this semester,” but that’s probably beta testing. If they’re going to switch the whole network, it’ll be over the summer, unless something goes horribly wrong. It’s incredibly late in the school year to try to switch 550 schools over to a new CMS.

On the other hand, the CP system has been experiencing periodic server issues (Http error 500 errors) recently, and their classified network shut down recently as well.

I like the promise of the Polopoly system, at least from what I saw at the CMA convention in October. Beyond that, it should be an interesting year for college media and the only full-service online publishing provider on the block.

Back home with reliable Internet access and some time to post, so here’s the first of several updates from the CMA/ACP National College Media Convention.

I got a few minutes to go over the new College Publisher content management system with David Studinski, Chris Gillon and a crew of folks from Polopoly.

The short of it: Polopoly is a tremendous upgrade over the current CMS. There are more features to the system than you can shake a stick at, and quite a few things that puts the system at the forefront of CMS’s for media web sites. Among the significant changes I saw:

• No more issue-based paradigm
• Ability to embed videos
• Community tools to allow users to have their own blogs and upload images, etc.
• Ability to change the front page on the fly
• Easier-to-manipulate design modules
• Real-time web stat tracking

From the little bit I got to see, this really will equip colleges with a high-end CMS equivalent to the industry standard.  Obviously, it will take some transitioning for those who are on the current system, but it’s a promising development.

The downside to the preview? It’s not likely to be rolled out until summer 2008. That’s understandable, since many publications don’t publish in the summer, or publish less often, so changes can be made easier then. Still, it’s frustrating knowing that such a high-end system is in the works, but we’ll have to wait to experience it in production.