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CMS for High School Newspaper Website? 79

Posted by Cliff from the what's-handling-YOUR-content dept.
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?"
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CMS for High School Newspaper Website? More

CMS for High School Newspaper Website?

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  • Bricolage (Score:3, Informative)

    by CmdrChillupa ( 166635 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @03:22PM (#11365576)
    Bricolage [bricolage.cc]

    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)

      by greechneb ( 574646 )
      Xoops has impressed me, a lot of features, pretty easy to get going, and a lot of available modules to add what you want. - Best of all, its GPL

      http://xoops.org/ [xoops.org]

    • Re:Bricolage (Score:3, Informative)

      by Paul Bain ( 9907 )

      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)

    by mstefanus ( 705346 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @03:24PM (#11365627)
    You can try Mambo [mamboserver.com] or Typo3 [typo3.com]. They are both great.

    But before making a decision, you can check OpenSourceCMS [opensourcecms.com] for demo of diferent CMS'. Another great comparison site is CMSMatrix [cmsmatrix.org]
    • a vote for mambo. very full featured(perhaps even too full feature if there can be such a thing?) and easy to get going.

    • Another vote for Mambo, although it takes a lot of work to keep it from looking like the cookie cutter default templates. Here are some samples of sites that went online and made only minimal changes to the templates:

      http://www.trunkmonkeyracing.com/ [trunkmonkeyracing.com]
      http://www.trunkmonkey.com/ [trunkmonkey.com]
      http://www.hamorhollow.com/ [hamorhollow.com]
      • how come you don't keep the mambo link on the bottom? I use mambo too, but I think for the feature set and the price (nothing), a link to them is the least I can do...
    • Typo3 is very full-features, but it's a major pain in the ass to use. Admittedly, I spent very little time with it (thankfully!), but it was a struggle to do things as simple as inserting text links with accompanying icons into an alreay existing page. Likewise, adding a new page requires the jumping through of many hoops as you have to decide what type of template to use, and which "objects" should be available. And forget about just adding straight HTML, none of the site's styles will be applied to it.

      An
    • WebGUI [webgui.org] is written in Perl and has all kinds of features you really want like:
      • poll's
      • discussion on anything
      • user and group management
      • builtin RSS feed reader
      • keyword search builtin
      • templateable everything (from page till user interface).
      Try comparing it to Mambo or Typo3 using CMSMatrix while you are at it.
  • Personally, I would recommend postnuke.
    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 !
  • Try Geeklog [geeklog.net]. Very similar in looks to Slashcode -- has a poll, articles, site calendar, and so on. Geeklog is pretty basic at this point -- all sites tend to look more or less the same 3-column layout -- but very easily themeable (and with a community that makes up for the features it lacks).

    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
  • Really good CMS Features news, portals, lots of themes / looks/ feels, chatbox, forums, calendar etc. It's perfect. www.e107.org www.e107themes.org

  • Drupal (Score:3, Interesting)

    by redune45 ( 194113 ) <.moc.enuder. .ta. .todhsals.> on Friday January 14, 2005 @03:38PM (#11365823) Homepage
    Give Drupal [drupal.org] a try. It is very customizable, and you should be able to configure it to do whatever you would like.

    It is the CMS behind Spread Firefox [spreadfirefox.org]
    • You may have meant spreadfirefox.com [spreadfirefox.com].

    • Re:Drupal (Score:3, Informative)

      by Scaba ( 183684 )

      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.

    • "Give Drupal a try. It is very customizable, and you should be able to configure it to do whatever you would like."

      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)

    by uits ( 792760 )
    www.plone.org Easy to install, easy to use, easy on the eyes. Tons of 'products' that install into and provide additional functionality.

    • 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)

    by darkjedi521 ( 744526 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @03:47PM (#11365914)
    Back in the Dark Ages (98-00), when I did the online content for my High School, I just used a simple frameset. Pick an issue, the headlines with in a column down the left, the article was on the right. I wasn't allowed any active content on either server or client, so that was the best compromise at the time. It worked well enough.

  • Simple is good (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rueger ( 210566 ) * on Friday January 14, 2005 @03:47PM (#11365922) Homepage
    "...larger CMS offerings ... seem too complex and powerful for this project. Are there any suggestions from Slashdot readers who run high school or college newspapers?"

    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.
    • That's mainly it, though also I really don't want to spend a few months trying to make a generic cms do what I want it to.
      • I have also been researching the possibility of using a CMS for our school newspaper's website. The problem is most things posing as content managers are really just community-ware. I just to be able to set something up to allow other students to edit and publish their issues. I don't need forums, chat, downloads, blogs, or user profiles. The only possibly additive feature would be image management.

  • Mambo (Score:1)

    by Oz0ne ( 13272 )
    Not very complex... not very feature rich, but pretty nice.
  • use php/mysql and that's it. besides then you're in control of all the code, and you don't get the standart template design

  • Roll your own (Score:3, Interesting)

    by saintp ( 595331 ) <stpierre@nospAM.nebrwesleyan.edu> on Friday January 14, 2005 @03:52PM (#11365970) Homepage
    No, really. I did it [nebrwesleyan.edu] as an undergrad (the code is GPL'd if you want it), and it took very little time: I worked with one other programmer very part time for a summer, and then off and on thenceforth.

    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.

    • I second this idea. I rolled my own CMS for my personal family news web site. I had a very specific set of requirements, and now I have exactly the system I wanted, no more, no less.

      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

    • Heh. Then you'd better go directly to the CS students which you know are good, and not get a teacher to do it as a class assignment. I took web design and cisco, and most guys in those classes had no clue what they were doing. Now, I realize that these were not PHP/perl classes, but since my school had no such thing, most of the guys who would be into that took cisco. But the average grade was F, at 35%.

  • CollegePublisher (Score:2, Informative)

    by jtmas83 ( 794264 ) *
    My college's newspaper [campustimes.org] uses College Publisher [collegepublisher.com]. However, I know absolutely nothing about it, including how much it costs.

    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.
    • I used to publish my college newspaper using CollegePublisher and it was a nice easy to use and manage system. The cost was simply running their ads in every issue. We left the service because I could design and maintain a site myself and the publishing staff would not have to give up ad and story space in the paper. This was two or three years ago however, and I don't know if things have changed. I thought I read somewhere a long time ago that they offered a service for high school papers but I don't see a
    • From their FAQ;

      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 (www.moodle.org) seems like it may suit your needs. LAMP based, easy setup.

  • Obligatory Slashdot Management Complaint (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @04:25PM (#11366364) Homepage Journal
    We spend a lot of time talking about content management. There should really be a topic for it.
  • Use PHP Nuke. There are a ton of modules for it and it is easy to use once setup. You can even alow people to submit their own stories.
    • But it's very, very weak security. If yu ahve a small site, it would be alright, but if you have something that is totally serious and can not be sabatoged, I'd encourage you look at something else. My recommendation is e107 [e107.org]. Easy to use, fully featured and has a developer community for it.
    • The best thing about PHPNuke is that, thanks to SQL injection, you can submit your own stories whether you're allowed to or not!

      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)

    by mopslik ( 688435 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @04:37PM (#11366558)

    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.

    • Mainly it's that wordpress lacks some really important functionality neccessary for this application, for instance being able to have a different template for the main index page.

      • 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.

      • Can't you set up two installations (configuration files) on the same server, but point them to the same database/directory? The data should be shared between the two, but you can customize the two page designs.

      • ...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

  • Using GeekLog. It fell through, in part because the newspaper's advertising contracts didn't allow it, and our literary magazine had enough trouble getting submissions that we didn't have time to set up the site ... but GeekLog itself was very nice. The best part of the project, although that's not saying much.
  • I use it and is great, open source, PHP, MySQL, easy administration e installation...

  • News Blog Instead (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wishus ( 174405 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @05:02PM (#11366911) Journal
    Why publish a traditional, monthly school newspaper on the web? People don't read the web that way.

    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.
  • Not sure what your requirements are (one issue per month but MT is "too simple"?) but CityDesk [fogcreek.com] is one way to go. Non-free Windows-only binary but it's great software and you don't need anything on the server except FTP. Free trial version, $299 to buy. Sounds expensive until you consider the cost of training. With CityDesk it's "Sit here, type into this thing that looks a lot like Word, and click 'pubish'."
  • Since it seems you are not looking for a cms but a website that focuses in nothing but delivering news i recomend writing your own cms. I am currently in the process of doing this for my college and i'm finding it to be incredibly easy to do so. It consists of postgresql and php. It supports all the major features one would expect.

    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.
  • Every time someone asks about the camparative benefits of CMS packages, it seems like someone has to mention each package out there at least once. So here goes...

    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
  • It sounds like a perfect project for students in the school who study IT/programming. A good IT teacher should have no problems guiding a group of students through the process.

  • XOOPS (Score:3, Informative)

    by pjay_dml ( 710053 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @06:30PM (#11368291) Journal
    XOOPS [xoops.org] should be what you are looking for. It is modular, and you can easily add content, or have people not too computer savvy do so.

    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.

    ...by the way, I'm affiliated with XOOPS, in that I am a community member, mod developer, and translator :)...
  • This was coded by a friend of mine, and its designed expressly for this purpose: http://www.iwebpress.com/ [iwebpress.com]

  • eZ Publish (Score:3, Informative)

    by kosmosik ( 654958 ) <kos@ko[ ]sik.net ['smo' in gap]> on Saturday January 15, 2005 @08:42AM (#11372548) Homepage
    http://ez.no/ez_publish

    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_func ti onality

    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/ is sue_01/focus_format_xml/
    • ezPublish is definitely worth checking out.
      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
      • As for documentation - well nobody in open source community likes to write it (I actually like it - but I am not coder). Coders like to code but not to document. eZ Publish was initially a closed product - it was opened somewhere near 4.x version (so prior three versions were closed) - so it looks like (sadly) only most popular projects get good documentation (and docs are a basical thing - a program is not valuable to me if I don't know how it works (I don't have docs)).

        As for PHP - well PHP is now quite
        • No, from what I understand of ezPublish, it has always (or nearly always) been an open source project, but it's developed and supported by a commercial company.
          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 http://plone.org/ [plone.org] should be on your list to check out. It's designed as a communal publishing system with orderly content flows and a permission heirarchy for bringing submitted content to the site through moderators.

    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

  • You get CMS release 6 in the VM/370 distribution here [copyleft.de] :-)

  • Plone (Score:1)

    by KmN ( 725025 )
    I'm currently in the process of converting my school's site to Plone [plone.org]. It's easy to install and use. However, it is its own server, so if you just want to run a php application on top of Apache, I would reccomend something like Mambo [mamboserver.com] or Typo3 [typo3.org]
  • Look at pmwiki.org. it's the most customizeable wiki I've seen yet. PHP running on anything will do it. It's so easy. and about 250k. drop the pmwiki comment "includes" into your html, save it as the template file. add your CSS file too. the whole site will run off of a completely configurable single template file. want to change the site? change the single template file and the CSS file and you have a new look. my site uses it now, and you can create new articles just by using wiki words. You can cr
  • While we don't currently run any websites for schools, our web management system is probably a good match for your needs, and we'll be happy to strike a deal for a non-profit like a school. Take a look at what we have to offer [beyourown.net], prices start at $8 per month, it's simple for even the meek to use, yet it has a very nice feature set.
  • Tw.o is a poerful CMS and soo much more!! And it's free check it out [tikiwwiki.org]
  • Macromedia Contribute [macromedia.com] is a pretty good CMS app. I've used it for a few of my small clients who need to do minor updates. The learning curve is pretty small.
  • I am the webmaster for the Davenport West Beak 'n Eye. I was going through the same problem about a year ago. I used http://www.opensourcecms.com/ [opensourcecms.com] and tried out almost all of them and none of them would quite do what I wanted. Mambo was the closest. I started using it and I loved it. I did have to modify it to include a second deck and to include captions underneith the pictures, but those modifications weren't too difficult. Mambo has a lot of great features and it will be really easy for someone to
  • I haven't seen this mentioned yet. WebGUI [plainblack.com] has it all - it's very easy to use and also very flexible. You can give different groups the ability to update their own sets of pages. There's a huge set of contributors and a very active forum. They also have an excellent demo [plainblack.com].
  • I apologise for this being off-topic in regard to newspaper content management but ... Like many people (I suspect) I have been looking at CMS as a solution for more mundane administration tasks, specifically for logging changes to servers and services. I work in satellite broadcast television and the effects of even a small change can affect a wide range of staff groups (not to mention 500,000 subscribers). We rely on paper logs and emailed alerts of changes but there is no central web-based solution for

  • Citydesk (Score:1)

    by YE ( 23647 )
    Citydesk [fogcreek.com] by the company of software engineering guru Joel Spolsky [joelonsoftware.com], would be an excellent choice if you are a) running Windows b) willing to spend a little money.

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