Lately the newsroom has expressed quite bit of frustration over the limitations of College Publisher. So much so that I am considering rolling out an alternative, although the work involved would me massive, I think it could help our work flow. But College Publisher, like any other Content Management System, has its pros and cons:
Cons:
- Although CP is free, they take total control over at least half of your ads. With their recent merger with MTV, the CP community has seen some not-so-hot ads sneak their way into the system.
- Image display. For some god forsaken reason the image management with CP is sub par. It automatically converts and resizes all of your uploaded images. Although there are options to turn these features off it would be defeating the purpose of having a CMS as you would have to do it all by hand. All resized images usually come out blurry as all hell.
- Support. The CP team does a great job handling all support questions however I get the sense they are slightly over worked. I have had support questions sit for weeks before getting any response. Every on on the team is amazing at what they do, they are just severely understaffed.
- What you see is what you get. There are no CP plugins or themes. You either have to ask them to do it, or spend your time knee deep in CPML (College Publisher Markup Language). Which brings me to my next point…
- You have to learn a whole new language. While most CMS’s use PHP, CP is using there own markup that makes it a pain in the butt to do anything in the code. In their defense they do provide extensive documentation, but I wish there was some easier way.
- Old content is buried. CP uses an issue system when marking articles. Therefore when you switch to your new issue all old content is relegated to your archives, usually never to be seen again.
Pros
- As stated above when they get the support question back to me, it usually is instantaneous, and everyone over there is easily accessible with a phone call or email.
- There is a vast community of Web Editors that frequent the message boards that usually answer any questions pretty quickly.
- CP (as far as I can see) is the only CMS that is geared specifically toward College Newspapers.
- Its free.
- Its fairly idiot proof. Even if you dont know a lick of HTML the guys at CP can get a site set up for you in no time.