A College Online Newspaper Suite as Open Source? 33
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?"
Well.... (Score:3, Insightful)
From my experience, the people running the school paper websites are doing it because they want the experience. What looks better on a resume: "Developed custom applications for automatic formatting and publishing a news website" or "Found free software to do my job so I could play more Everquest"?
Reinventing the wheel (Score:4, Insightful)
There are three of us in our MIS office, and between the three of us we are responsible for everything from backups to phones. When I first started there was no system for online information delivery. Initially we tried writing our own custom pages but it eventually became obvious that a prebuilt CMS would benifit us greatly. I'd had experience with PHP-Nuke before so we decided to give it a shot and it has been perfect for our needs ever since.
Which ever package you potentially decide on it's likely you'll desire features that are not included. This turned from being our motiviation to create a whole site to creating custom modules for Nuke. Nuke gave us the base, and so far I've finished a staff/faculty information module, started an online scheduling application, and I'm currently working on moving our paper based critique system to a module as well.
Unless you're looking to develop something soley to try and market, it's difficult to find a reason to start from scratch. A freshmeat search turns up a healthy ammount of people doing their own thing so you can scope out your competition. Otherwise, find the one you like the best and mod the hell out of it.