When I announced that the Temple News was moving to WPMU, I promised to keep the world updated. So consider this a progress report of sorts.

Overall, the site has given us the freedom and flexibility we thought it would. There is no limit to the kind of content we want to deliver. If I had to do it again, I would in a heartbeat. We are getting more daily content, more multimedia, and we are on the cusp of launching an advertising program.

However, WordPress was not meant to handle a newspaper Web site without tweaks. At The Temple News we took many steps to bend the Content Management System to our needs. As expected, there are a few things I am having trouble with. I provide this list to provide an inside look at the problems with the move, as well as asking if anybody else can see a way to fix these problems.

1. RSS is not a good way to deliver a weekly email edition. Let me state for the record: Feedblitz is an awful, awful, awful service. They don’t respond to customer service emails, and their phone number just tells you to email them. When I set up our newsletter I scheduled the Temple News email to only go out weekly. It went out daily. And on top of that, you can’t have the feed display more than 10 items. I am searching for an alternative RSS to email service that does weekly delivery and have come up short. I’ve been exploring Yahoo! Pipes, so hopefully I can patch this up shortly.
2. Access domains are the devil. I initially set up the Temple News on an access domain and then moved it. Bad idea. For some godforsaken reason, it made some of the javascript not work in certain browsers. The is somewhere in the WordPress instillation that still points to our access domain, and I can’t find it. Ive searched the database and ever php file.

   In fact, after giving my presentation in New York, someone asked me what I would do differently if I had to do it again. My answer was that I wouldn’t use an access domain, I would just shut down the main site for a day and make the switch.

3. Our comments broke. I suspect this is linked to the above, but users could fill out a comment form, and it would go in our database, but it would never appear under the article. Or worse it appeared under the wrong article. I don’t know how that is even possible, and neither does anyone on the WPMU forums. I switched themes, even messed with the comments.php file to no avail.
4. Doubling breaks. As most of you know, in newspapers there is no line break after a paragraph. However, on the Web, there is. College Publisher had a hand-dandy “double breaks” button that would automatically insert this break for you. I know this was Javascript, and currently trying to find a solution for WordPress, pay a freelancer to code a TinyMCE plugin for us, or (gulp) code one myself…
5. Photo cutlines. Currently we have no cutlines on our photos. This is because there is no Flickr plugin that handles this function. We may have to resort to hosting all of our own photos to fix this.
6. One day is only 24 hours long.

The solution to a few of these problems is to reinstall the entire site which I plan on doing soon as Temple wins the National Championship and the news slows down. This is a tricky endevour, and something I have never done. The WordPress export file to our site is so large the import doesn’t work unless you cut it up into smaller sections, so I need to treat this adventure with care.

The other problems, such as the RSS problem can be fixed with due time and diligence. However, there is a problem when you don’t know XML, PHP, or Javascript. But I would take having our destiny in our hands over having to call a support team any day. It’s very humbling to have things go wrong, but it is also very empowering. We have a few more steps to get the site out of the unofficial “beta” phase, and it all has to be done before May.

Game on.

Every college has their famous alumni.  For Temple, an incomplete rundown would include Bill Cosby, Bob Saget, Jill Scott, and Hall and Oates.

Well, after months of pestering by fellow editor Christopher Wink, The Temple News scored an exclusive interview with both John Oates and Daryl Hall.  Their publicist informed us that it was the only the third time both were quoted in a story in the past 10 years, with the other two publications being Entertainment Weekly and the Chicago Tribune.  We decided that this would be a good chance to flex our new found online muscle and do the first “complete” multimedia package.  That is, a slideshow, video, and audio.

While it could be argued that soundslides, Flash, and more original video should be included, I think we covered our bases well.

So with the help of Hot Recorder and Skype we recorded Wink’s conversation with Oates, and using Flickr and YouTube we added some video and a slideshow.  Wink also wrote two articles as well.  The result is the first in our series of alumni profiles.

The hardest part of this was getting it all up under deadline.  After I was provided with the YouTube link, photos, audio, and text, we sketched out a design, and it was coded and up in a little under three hours (not counting me driving home for a bit).  While nothing revolutionary was done, it was a good test of him and I as we had to convert his Skype conversation into mp3′s, create a banner image, create a slideshow, and make a custom WordPress template page.

Check it out!

Many thanks to Mindy McAdams for her awesome 1 Pixel out tutorial, and to IRIS design for the snazzy button.

I have to say I am eternally grateful for all of the kind words and support about our switch to WPMU.  I also found out a lot of things from just the feedback. For instance The Nevada Sagebrush beat us to the title of being the first College Newspaper to run on WPMU.

Nuts.

But all is not bad news. In the first two days of being live our page views were 400% higher the first day and 300% the second. This is without yet sending out a “weekly email edition” that used to be the source of almost all of our traffic. The email audience is largely alumni who could probably care less what the site looks like. The real test of the new site is see if we can get students to actively engage the content. Of course to do that, we must have frequent updates and build a community. Things that are all in the works.

But in the comment thread of my last post, Kelly Sutton asked why we choose MU. The reasons:

1. Pure selfishness. I have used Drupal, Xoops, and WordPress as CMS’s before, and I have had the most positive experience with WordPress. This is not me saying one is “better” than another, just with my skill set WordPress came easiest.
2. Many blogs, one roof. WPMU allows the owner to have an infinite number of blogs all under one domain. While at the moment The Temple News only has three online properties (the main site, our soon to be released alumni blog, and Broad and Cecil) I wanted who ever is coming after me to have as much flexibility as possible. Which brings me to…
3. Turnover. The worst enemy of college newspapers (and college sports) is the high degree of turnover. On average staff members are employed for two years, so any broad changes need to be heavily documented and made so that someone with absolutely no knowledge could come in and run the site. Using Drupal or Xoops I always felt like the learning curve was very steep. However WordPress seems fairly direct, and although I am not quite finished in writing our site’s “handbook”, I feel like if I got hit by a SEPTA bus tomorrow the Temple News would be just fine.
4. Flexibility.  As I was making the site, several staffers came up to me and asked if we could do X.  99% of the time, there was a plugin for what they were asking.   This allows our CMS to grow and evolve as the technologies and needs change.  It also doesn’t hurt that WPMU is open source.  My only fear is that WPMU is shut down to devote more time to WordPress.
5. The support.  This goes for Drupal as well, but I feel like the WordPress community goes above and beyond the call of duty.  And if instant answers are needed, there are several paid services.

I hope that answered any questions!

PS.  In my last post I briefly mentioned that my car was broken into.  Well as I was figuring out what to do, The Philadelphia Parking Authority had no sympathy and ticketed it.  So if you ever watch the show “Parking Wars“, the hatred city residents have for this organization is true to life.

I awoke at 4 in the morning to my cat having is head stuck in a Campbell’s soup can, I had my car broken into (damn you Philadelphia), and our move to WordPress almost exploded. So much for class.

I’ve alluded to it several times, but as of Tuesday February 5th, The Temple News has moved its Web site to its own independent WordPress server from College Publisher. The move was the result of months of planning and work, and hope you all check it out!

I know many colleges who have either thought about switching, or just completed the switch. In fact, the most recent post on the ICM blog is a video of the Miami Hurricane choosing Drupal. So part of the purpose of this post is to shine some light on how and why the Temple News did it.

Why Switch?

I suppose the first question on everyone’s mind is why we switched from CP. I want to state here that it had nothing to do with the quality of service those guys offered. Every time I called they always were extremely helpful and always found a solution. I would recommend CP to anyone else in a heartbeat. It just so happened that CP wasn’t the best for for the current direction of The Temple News.

One of the main reasons was the lack of independence. Because you are essentially getting a free CMS, you lose a bit of your autonomy. You are limited in the placement of your own ads, and even if your paper specifically needs a certain feature, it usually has to be rolled out through the whole system for it to be implemented. For example, we wanted a box that users could check to remove their article comment from print consideration, but such a change would need to be implemented on every site. Obviously it is not in CP’s best interest to work on a paper-to-paper basis as their staff is only so large.

The aforementioned lack of independence also made it hard to keep up technologically with competing Web sites. CP sites are written in CPML, a proprietary coding system that forces Web editors to learn an entire programming language to fiddle with certain aspects of their site. For a college student who will not use this language when they graduate, the motivation is just not there.

And lately, with the move to Viacom, many of CP’s servers became unstable. During one of our biggest stories of the year ( a student was sexually assaulted in a heavily trafficked hall) we had no service.

The Technical Stuff

The new Temple-News.com runs on a Media Temple gridserver and an instillation of WordPress MU (that’s multiple user). We ported our news blog broadandcecil.com over as well to have all of our online properties under one roof. When considering if WordPress could even handle a college newspaper I looked to The Collegian Online as proof of concept.

After the CMS was decided we had to port all of the old archives from CP to WordPress. This was by far the trickiest part, and one I couldn’t do with out the help of my father. CP was kind enough to give us our seven years of archives in a database. My dad and I spent the large part of Winter Break converting the database into a working WordPress table.

We ran into several snags as the WordPress tables have funny links, as well as information required that CP tables didn’t have (such as an article summary). We were able to transfer all of the archives with the exception of the latest semester. However, all of the archives permalinks did not work in WordPress unless we went in manually and assigned them a category (I believe only God knows why…). Also, we were unable to transfer authors. We were lucky enough that we had placed a “Sean Blanda can be contacted at …” so the user can find the author of articles even though there is no “official” author.

Therefore we are currently in the process recategorizing all of our archive links. I advise caution in directly editing the database, however we had no other option. The files did not play nice with the WP import/export feature and manually copy and pasting was out of the question.

After the database was transferred I installed the Premium News Theme from adii. From a quick browse I believe we are the largest publication to use this theme. The main reason we choose this theme was that it featured easy advertising, thumbnail management, and heavily featured multimedia. It was built for the forward thinking blogger crowd, and it was a crowd we wanted to attract and even emulate somewhat as we attempt to push our brand further towards modernity.

As mentioned before, we still had a whole semester gap in the archives so I spent the last week of my winter break manually cutting, pasting, tagging, and importing six months worth of content. It was a good dry run that allowed me to work out many kinks in the system while we still only on our access domain.

The one problem with having your own server is that the space is limited. Therefore we are cautiously using outside services for the hosting of our media. A Flickr Pro account will be our de-facto photo archive system and YouTube will handle videos.

There are several benefits to using these services:

1. Low or no cost
2. Saves server space
3. Flickr allows users to purchase photos (indirectly)
4. They give us a strong presence on two of the largest communities on the Web
5. They teach our staff members Web 2.0 tools

The one downside of course is the very lack of independence we avoided in migrating from CP. What if Flickr and YouTube shut down tomorrow? We felt the rewards were worth the risk. And because Yahoo and Google back these products we felt reasonably secure. However this may be in doubt over as the future ownership of Yahoo! in is question.

After setting up the services, it was time to switch over the DNS to point to the new server.

Then something funny happened.

There was a WordPress rewrite in the database that forwarded all visits to temple-news.com to our access domain. This created a redirecting loop that was only solved by going in the database and editing the table. Funny thing was, I did not overlook this, however when I edited the domains, I left a trailing slash.

Thats right, a trailing slash had me awake until 4 am calling Media Temple, trying to figure out why it didn’t work.

I could honestly write a book on this whole process, but I just wanted to show not only what I have been doing (and why my posting has been sporadic) but to provide a blueprint of sorts to anyone thinking of moving there college newspaper either to or from College Publisher. I also plan on keeping all of you guys posted on the drawbacks and benefits of running a publication on WordPress. As of now, the Temple News is scheduled to speak at the upcoming conference in New York at the College Media Conference about alternatives to College Publisher, and I will most certainly be there to follow up on this.

I will say for the record that at the outset of this operation, WordPress MU seemed like the best choice. However there is a huge lack of community support (especially when you are used to WordPress ) and many Plugins that work for WP don’t work for WPMU. I don’t care what their site says.

As any new site, there are many bugs likely to pop up, but overall I’m proud of what we were able to do and now I can focus on creating content instead of managing it. And I will certainly be posting heavily about the transition in the weeks to come.

Hear that?

That’s the sound of thousands of college students exhaling as finals week draws to a close. After a weekend in Jersey, I’ll be back in Philadelphia with the following tasks on my plate:

A new Temple-News.com: at the Temple News we have been quietly working on a few changes to our site.  If all goes well we should be doing some things that no college newspaper has done/is doing. I can’t wait to show it off here.  This should be done by the first week in January.

A new seanblanda.com:  Now that I plan on taking on more freelance work, I need a better Web site. I have a new layout all done in photoshop it’s just time code.

Speaking of freelance work, Ill be catching up with some clients who I had to put the work on hold for finals.

And graduation nears, it may be time to *gasp* look for jobs/internships…

SimplyRSS has solved that problem by adding page functionality, and I am currently using SimplyRSS for The Temple News. I suggest adding your paper’s blog and site feeds to get some more pageviews as well as spreading awareness of your content.

Thanks to Scott Stewart of the Gateway for giving me the heads up.

Overall I liked the way it turned out, I just wish I had more pictures. Also I have realized that organizing the information from every section was nearly as important as the execution.

I hope you like it.

Side note: College Publisher sites have been up and down for the past two days.  Try refreshing if something doesn’t load. 

So we only let the outside world know about the blog by displaying it on the front page of the paper and by running Facebook flyers. I also encouraged staffers to put the links in their profiles as well as integrate their WordPress author RSS feeds to automatically add to their Facebook “Posted Items”. So where did the first two days of traffic come from?

<– See for yourself. Although it doesn’t look like much, the 1′s go on for another page. And as an added little bonus I can see what staff members have the most trafficked Facebook profiles (always worth the bragging rights).

I’ll have to do the exact math later when our ad runs off of Facebook, but I’d say so far so good.

Running on WordPress and the fabulous PressRow, Broad and Cecil is our catch-all our blog where the staff can post on anything Temple (or Philly) related. The reason the topic is so broad is to test the waters. While the whole staff has theories on what would make a good blog, we really won’t know until we check out the traffic and the comments. Most likely at the onset of next semester we will split into a few blogs. Blog content also gives us something to post on the front page of Temple-News.com everyday.

We also need to get a workflow established as well as work out some technical kinks. So we have established a one week dry run where we try to get at least 2-3 posts a day. However not many people will know the blog exists until Tuesday when we feature the blog in our print edition as well as run a heavy Facebook advertising campaign.

The goal is to add a Temple News property that is in the list of a student’s daily visited Web sites. Here at Temple University, we have one of the largest computer labs on the planet and when I stroll through and see what students are viewing, 50% of the time it is Facebook. We want to be on that list of sites that students visit went they sit down to procrastinate from doing work.

Advice for anyone else considering starting a blog for their business/news paper/organization: To keep a blog pumping with content you need the full support of the staff. People need to be engaged and excited to try something new. Otherwise they will simply think you are trying to spread them a little thinner. Luckily with the Temple News if every staff member only writes once a week, we can have a nice well of content.

So take a look!

Glad you asked.

1. Be an intern for the Wilmington News Journal.  Me and three other lucky kids are in charge of creating a youth focused online news site.  I have some big ideas for this one and can’t wait to begin a project where I finally get to test out some of my theories about young people and news.  Having the backing of a large daily does not hurt either.
2. Revamp Temple-News.com …. again.  The website of my school paper has grown by leaps and bounds in the past year.  See it when we started and then now.  I’m ready to take it to the next level by trying something unconventional.  Maybe even running it on wordpress…. The site even was nominated for a pacemaker, but I know we can do better.
3. Freelance.  Despite all of the new media projects, writing is still king.
4. I bought starcraft2stuff.com.  I’m still deciding what to do with it.  For now, I have been playing around with Drupal for the first time.
5. England.  My brother is going to college over in London and I get to help him move in.

So, what are you doing?