CMS for High School Newspaper Website? 79
wyldeone asks: "I'm responsible for creating a site for my high schools newspaper, and I'm at a loss for what technology to use. It is small, and there will be about one issue a month. I have looked into some weblogging software like MovableType, and WordPress and they seems too simple, but larger CMS offerings (Campsite and PROPS, for example) seem too complex and powerful for this project. Are there any suggestions from Slashdot readers who run high school or college newspapers?"
Bricolage (Score:3, Informative)
Used by Salon, MacWorld, etc.
I started working with it for a newspaper website. It's solid, configurable and very open to design.
Re:Bricolage (Score:3, Informative)
http://xoops.org/ [xoops.org]
Re:Bricolage (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, Bricolage is an excellent CMS for news organizations (NO's, e.g., newspapers or magazines), but it has a well deserved reputation for being difficult to install, even on Debian, where an un-official Debian package is available to help ease the process. Even Bricolage's chief architect, David Wheeler, concedes this point.
The poster might be better off with SPIP [spip.net], which is (I understand) equally powerful and possibly easier to install. One caveat with respect to SPIP is that, at one point, its interface
Try these (Score:4, Informative)
But before making a decision, you can check OpenSourceCMS [opensourcecms.com] for demo of diferent CMS'. Another great comparison site is CMSMatrix [cmsmatrix.org]
Re:Try these (Score:2)
Re:Try these (Score:2)
http://www.trunkmonkeyracing.com/ [trunkmonkeyracing.com]
http://www.trunkmonkey.com/ [trunkmonkey.com]
http://www.hamorhollow.com/ [hamorhollow.com]
Re:Try these (Score:2)
Re:Try these (Score:2)
An
Try WebGUI too (Score:2)
postnuke! (Score:1)
Biggest advantage is that it will be easy to transition to other people, but also flexible enough to allow for heavy customization. Lots of places offer very cheap hosting, and will throw in a preinstalled postnuke, ssh and ftp access, etc. Check these guys out - I've used them for a couple of years now. http://www.hostnuke.com/ [hostnuke.com]
Just my $.02 !
For the basic 'portal' (Score:2)
I've been researching CMSs recently, and the problem I've come across is that they tend to look similar across themes, and/or their framework is overbroad and poorly documented, making it a monster just to make a few p
E107.org (Score:2)
Re:E107.org (Score:1)
Drupal (Score:3, Interesting)
It is the CMS behind Spread Firefox [spreadfirefox.org]
Re:Drupal (Score:2)
Re:Drupal (Score:3, Informative)
I second this. I'm not a big PHP fan, but the Drupal guys (and its cousin project CivicSpace [civicspacelabs.org]) were very thoughtful in designing a complete drop-in but very extensible CMS framework. Plone [plone.org] with Archetypes [sourceforge.net] is also a good choice, if you prefer Python (and who wouldn't?), and it tends to iron out a lot of the wrinkly parts of Zope [zope.org] that turn people away.
Re:Drupal (Score:1)
Agree with this: Drupal seems neat, well-organised, easy to setup, and it's pretty well optimised for "stories, blogs, and comments" systems similar to slashdot.
Zope/Plone (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Zope/Plone (Score:1)
That is, use Plone, built on Zope. Do not use Zope itself for what you're trying to do. Zope is a framework. Plone is an Open Source CMS built using Zope.
Plone probably gives you most of what you need "out of the box": users, groups, workflow, searching, content/presentation separation, some standard content types, etc. You'll probably want to customize the style to match your site and eventually create some custom content types. In that case, you'll need to read some of the documentation. Thankfu
Back in the dark ages (Score:3, Funny)
Simple is good (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that what wyldeone is requesting is a CMS that doesn't rely on a high level of ubergeekiness. Presumably he or she is working with a relatively unskilled group. Most of what's been suggested have a big learning curve, and require a willingness to dig into the guts of some pretty idiosyncratic packages.
If he or she is going to set up a system that will endure and be used it will need to be friendly to casual users who change from year to year.
Re:Simple is good (Score:2)
Re:Simple is good (Score:2)
Mambo (Score:1)
write one yourself (Score:1)
Roll your own (Score:3, Interesting)
We chose a roll-your-own solution mainly to avoid bloat, but also so that we'd be more familiar with the way it worked. Since you're looking for a CMS for a school, my advice is this: spread the wealth. Your journalism students are getting experience, why not throw a bone to your computer science students as well? Look at some popular CMSs, make a list of features you want (I guarantee that most of them will have a billion features you don't want) and then get some students to write it. That's what we did, and we're very happy with the outcome.
Re:Roll your own (Score:2)
My main reason for writing my own was that existing systems were all designed to generate each web page on the fly. I wanted both the ease of maintenance provided by a CMS and the benefits of a free static web page. My system combined the two approaches by locally generating web pages from a database, then uploading the pa
Re:Roll your own (Score:1)
CollegePublisher (Score:2, Informative)
Personally, I second the suggestion of Drupal; while it would probably take a bit of time to get it to do what you want, it's extremely customizable and once you get used to it, it's very easy to use. Plus, it's free.
Re:CollegePublisher (Score:1)
Re:CollegePublisher (Score:2)
Q. What is the cost of College Publisher?
A. College Publisher does not charge its partner newspapers.
Q. How does College Publisher make money on this deal?
A. As College Publisher provides the technology free-of-charge; we retain the right to place banners, buttons or links on each site
Moodle (Score:2)
Obligatory Slashdot Management Complaint (Score:5, Insightful)
PHPNuke (Score:1)
Re:PHPNuke (Score:1)
Re:PHPNuke (Score:2)
Seriously, PHPNuke is known for nothing so much as its security problems. If you need the style/functionality of PHPNuke, look at some of the other suggestions here for something similar.
Simplicity is good (Score:3, Insightful)
I have looked into some weblogging software like MovableType, and WordPress and they seems too simple
In what regard? I've helped some friends set up WP, and they like the simple-to-use interface, and after adding a few quick-and-dirty freely-downloadable hacks (picture galleries, icon displayers, etc) they're good to go. IMO, this would be a pretty straightforward setup for a high school newspaper. This is especially true if it's going to be run by students, who may want to contribute to the paper, but aren't the most computer-oriented.
Not to disagree with you at all -- it is meant to be simple. I'm just curious what requirements eliminate WP from your consideration.
Re:Simplicity is good (Score:2)
Re:Simplicity is good (Score:1)
being able to have a different template for the main index page
That could very well be true. Again, I'm not entirely sure what requirements your site has, and I haven't had the need to do this myself. Some other suggested Drupal [drupal.org], which looks as if it does what you describe.
Re:Simplicity is good (Score:2)
It's possible with WordPress... (Score:2)
...at least, from what I've tried.
The WordPress template is basically one PHP file, which seems ill-equip to handle multiple "looks". But since it's PHP, you can use If/Else statements to change the layout/content depending on the page (main index, archive, a permalink post, etc.)
Take a look at the PHP source Kubrick [binarybonsai.com]--one of the more popular WP themes--as an example. It uses If/Else statements to control the content and layout. It's a bit subtle, but permalink pages don't have sidebars, archive pages ha
I tried this a while back (Score:2)
Mambo (Score:1)
News Blog Instead (Score:3, Interesting)
Instead, switch to the slashdot/blog format. Publish articles as they happen, and your audience will connect with your site daily and keep up with the real news as it comes out.
The only reason school newspapers come out once a month is that it takes that long to produce enough material to fill a 10-12 page print newspaper. The web doesn't have those restrictions. Just publish the news on the website as it comes out.
Movable Type or Wordpress should be fine.
one possibility (Score:2)
Custom (Score:2)
If your intrested in taking a look at what i have or perhaps even helping the development process let me know at jjshoe at gmail.
PostNuke (Score:1)
I use PostNuke [postnuke.com] and I found it easy to set up and use. I have programming experience, but was pretty unfamilliar with PHP/mySQL and HTML when I started using this package. I don't run a newspaper site, but this package would easily do the trick. Also, PHP/mySQL are part of most hosting packages out there, so your serve probably already supports i
get your it students to write one ... (Score:1)
XOOPS (Score:3, Informative)
Also check out the School module [web-udvikling.dk], put together for a school by one of the core dev's - Mithrandir.
It is written in OO-PHP, uses the Smarty template engine, has an extensive community for support, is very simple to install, GPL licensed, and is under constant development.
iWebPress (Score:1)
eZ Publish (Score:3, Informative)
It is not just CMS - it is also entire framework to make modules that suit you. And it is easy to make such modules. With standard CMS systems you usualy have some prededifned obvious stuff like news, gallery, poll etc. but it is hard (it forces you to code in PHP) to add custom ones.
Also eZ Publish comes with best of breed features like caching, templates, XML, url-rewrites etc.
Check out its site for details, case studies and so on...
http://ez.no/ez_publish/info/web_publishing_fun
Also if your zine/newspaper is published on paper and different media you probably want to simplify the proces and reuse content on both (electronic and paper) media. So maybe you will be interested in integrating these things with XML. FreeSoftwareMagazine has an interesting article/introduction on this topic:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues
Re:eZ Publish (Score:1)
The best feature is the fact that their documentation contains a tutorial that steps you through the process of implementing a real site.
A lot of the other CMSs out there that have shown promise have lacked signigicantly in the "Getting started doing the real stuff you're going to do with it" sort of documentation. Others lack any useful free documentation at all.
Also, I rather liked the way that Plone worked, but it was way, way too slow, suffered from not havi
Re:eZ Publish (Score:2)
As for PHP - well PHP is now quite
Re:eZ Publish (Score:1)
They make their money by dual licensing it and selling a commercial licensed version (that is the same as the open source version, but gives you the right to keep any products developed on top of it closed). They also sell a WYSIWYG online editor and offer support.
They're also only up to version 3.5 right now...
As for PHP, the problem isn't that it
Plone : free, easy, open and a decent UI to boot (Score:1)
I've used it for several sites, and I expect it might fit your school newspaper model (perhaps multiple contributors to a periodical publication).
The best thing (I think) about Plone is your "users" can contribute rich articles to the site without dicking around in HTML or external ed
Older CMS (circa 1979) is available for free (Score:2)
Plone (Score:1)
pmwiki would be great for that job (Score:1)
BeYourOwn.net (Score:1)
We're a highschool and we TikiWiki!! (Score:1)
Re:We're a highschool and we TikiWiki!! (Score:1)
Macromedia (Score:2)
Mambo (Score:1)
WebGUI (Score:2)
Logging? (Score:1)
Citydesk (Score:1)