A College Online Newspaper Suite as Open Source?

Gurami asks: "I'm a part of a student run team at my school that develops a student website, like those found at many schools, that offers news and services to the college community. Recently, we agreed to create a web based set of apps for a new online student publication. It allows the editors of a publication to manage assignments (articles and media), layout, advertising, workloads, contact information, and some other neat things related to online newspapers/publications, in PHP. Our question is: Is there a market for this sort of web suite, would we be able to package and sell it, or open source it, and sell setup and maintenance services for it to college and university student groups?"

OpenACS

[AndyElf]

You REALLY should look at it. This is a great tool when it come to on-line community building. See at their site [openacs.org]. FWIW, Greenpeace web site is running on it. It is fully open-sourced, supports both Oracle and PostgreSQL, has a very well-organized development process, quite detailed documentation, etc., etc., etc.

Last, but not least, they can benefit from worthy contributors.

As a let-down of sorts -- it is not PHP.

There is a market

[strudeau]

I work for a college newspaper.

There is definitely a market for software to run college newspaper websites. Two companies that provide services are College Publisher [collegepublisher.com] and Digital Partners [digitalpartners.com]. As far as I can tell, College Publisher's tools and terms are pretty awful. Digital Partners is better. Most of their stuff is written in PHP, their template system allows for more flexibility and their terms (on things like ad revenue sharing, costs, locations of banners, etc) are a bit more reasonable. Our paper uses Digital Partners, and they seem to be growing rapidly. I think we could do better on our own if their were resources (or willing talent) available -- I'm too busy keeping things running to develop a project.

I think a cooperative effort of college papers to produce an open source content management system to for publishing a paper online would be a fantastic project. If work begins on this, please let me know (strudeau takethispartout AT umich dot edu) ...

This could be built in many ways on top of many open source CMS solutions (OpenACS, Zope, midgard, etc). One project that might be worth looking at is PROPS [sourceforge.net] which is designed specifically for newspapers and seems to be pretty simple and workable ... written in php.

SINapse

[NBrooke271]

The University of Oklahoma has a nice open-source package availible to do what you've described: SINapse [sinapse.org], the PHP backend for the Sooner Information Network [ou.edu]. Very effective and freely availible [sinapse.org].