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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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…
- 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.
- 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.
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“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.”
That question was submitted by me via text message to the news editor, who was in attendance, haha. She relayed the access domain advice, which is very insightful and I’m sure will save us difficulty. Many thanks.
You should write a manual called, “College Newspaper Switching to WPMU” … would it be the first book compilation of blogs posts?
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The Double Break problem:
We installed the Advanced TinyMCE Editor which has a handy dandy ‘Paragraph’ formatting function which wraps each paragraph in [p] [/p] tags, essentially creating double breaks. If you don’t edit it in Firefox it may bug out and take out all the line breaks … so make sure to tell anyone with posting access to do it in Firefox.
Cutlines:
This one’s a dilemma. There’s a plugin called Image Caption that will insert the title attribute of any image in a Wordpress post to display it as a caption beneath the photo … the reason we haven’t been able to use it is because Advanced TinyMCE strips out certain code for ’security reasons,’ including the title attribute of images, javascript code, embed codes — a lot of shit. So, until I find a way to resolve that, its pretty much a choice between easy double line breaks or image captions.
E-Mail Subscriptions:
The Sagebrush uses a the Feedburner email subscription services. I tried a number of plugins that were just a disaster before that, but Feedburner seems to handle things really well. Burn your main feed, but make sure to go into Wordpress ( Dashboard > Options > Reading ) and change the Syndication feed to show some really high post count, so its not limited to 10. I think I set it to 300. It doesn’t have a setting to send out weekly updates — only daily at a certain time, but I like this, as it sends out a mass e-mail on production nights and small updates for breaking news and such. It also has great user management — shows how many users you have, their emails, if they’ve verified, when they subscribed, and if there have been multiple failed delivery attempts — all exportable to an Excel spreadsheet. You can also remove users or pause their subscriptions.
I’m currently lobbying to change #6. Wish me luck ;]
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I was pondering the e-mail issue and had a couple ideas:
Feedburner: At first I didn’t think this would be a solution — and maybe it isn’t — because I don’t think there’s a way to change the frequency, as far as I know, but you could ask them. Some pluses: it requires no work after it’s set up; it offers certain metrics and a variety of cool features.
HTML e-mail: Requires more work, but offers certain benefits, such as being able to design the newsletter (probably using a pre-made template). Also, I’ve never done anything like this before, but I imagine you could have a form on the site that submits e-mail addresses to a database that you can use a listserv.
I haven’t had a change to play with Pipes yet, so please post/let me know how that goes.
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Ah-ha! I was right about Feedburner, but I didn’t see Chelsea’s comment before I posted mine…strange.
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Sounds like the “double breaks” problem and the photo cutlines problem mean you just need a couple of additional functions on TinyMCE instead of most of the useless ones that are currently there.
Personally, I don’t like TinyMCE very much. It has issues with browser compatibility, it just doesn’t want to play nice with Safari, and making sure it’s html filtering doesn’t mess things up is a pain. Beyond that, most of it’s functions are just unnecessary for a site when nearly all the formatting is the same for every post, and so the formatting is in the stylesheet where it belongs. I have it disabled for as much as possible on our blogs.
@Chelsea, the filtering controls for html in posts are in wp-includes/kses.php by the way, your site is really pretty
I think the best way for both of these might be to code the two javascript functions that are needed. Hmm… I wonder if there’s any ajax libraries you could build off of. I know for one we’ve been searching for something to add in photo captions and credits in wordpress for a while now.
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following up on my last comment, hacking this file wp-includes/js/quicktags.js?ver=3958 would probably be relatively easy to add in a new function to do double line breaks/p tags whatever you prefer to format text.
cutlines for images seems a little harder. the most elegant solution would be to modify the function that gets called when you click “send to editor” but an easier hack might be to write a function that formats images after the fact.
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Thanks! I’ll edit that file and try that plugin again
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Thanks guys this is all gold.
We should all collaborate more…
And Greg, that is too funny. How come you didnt make it up?
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I thought you would have had some SPAM problems. I assume your using Akismet which is keeping the spam at bay.
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1. You formed the sentence wrong: weekly editions are not a good way to deliver “news.”
2. Not sure exactly what an access domain is. Sounds like a problem having to do with relative paths.
3. Mysterious.
4. There are several things that can do this, the easiest is a script that says “make every \n into \n\n and remove all \t”
5. Is there no way to get photo descriptions out of flickr? If there is, put a CSS wrapper around your images and add a tag.
6. Delegation.
6.
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Sean, this service looks interesting, and might be worth exploring if you seriously want to put out a weekly e-mail edition: feedjournal.com.
As to the “double breaks” issue, I think you might be overthinking this. I have no problem using the visual editor in WP and getting adequate space between paragraphs using the CSS styles and changing the margin in the (p) tag. Or am I missing something?
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