I received some emails a few weeks ago with comments on our new site design at the Washburn Review. All I did was work on a new template for our site--mostly CSS editing. No changes to the backend (aka still with CP4).
My adviser posted a link on the CMA listserv to show off what we've been working on, and she forwarded me a few of the emails:
"Are you running CP5? I like the layout."
"...I'm curious also if you're running CP5 for your site. My web editor is using the old CP and is complaining about it because she says she can't update it daily "blog style" but only when uploading the content of an entire issue..."
The second email mentions "blog style updating," or simply having the newest news at the top of the page. The trick to this one is simple-- it is a blog!
Contact the nice people at college publisher, and they'll set up a WordPress installation on your College Publisher site. It works great (because it isn't related to CP at all!).
You can see our installation at: blogs.washburnreview.org
I'll post something on our blogging arrangement later. We have each of our newspaper editors post weekly, but with midterms we've slowed down a bit.
I struggle to find words that describe my feelings against a sidebar on College Publisher sites. I don't even have screenshots from when we used to have them, because they are so hideous. I found this on the Wayback Machine:
As you can see, our new design is a huge improvement. The sidebar eats up loads of horizontal space. We don't have much room for the "feature" column, and the "lead" column is competing with the sidebar for attention.
Rather than having a sidebar run down the entire page, we modified our design to include a horizontal menu bar run under our logo/masthead/flag. This has given us a much cleaner design (menu doesn't fight with content) and a lot more horizontal space to work with.
College Publisher offers staging sites to help you develop a new site design. I took advantage of this over the summer to design our current site. Check out our prototype: cpstaging1.com
Email the College Publisher support staff, and they'll set you up. After requesting a staging site, I worked on the staging site for a couple months, playing around with different layouts and experimenting with different multimedia features. When I was ready to switch over, I sent another email and they ported the design over.
All in all, the design and implementation process for a new site is fairly painless. Using a staging site allows you to take risks without screwing up your production site, and the College Publisher staff take the hard work out of transitioning to your new design. At the end of my design process, all I had to do was change a few settings to bring the new design live.
College Publisher is not a very adaptive CMS solution. Many college newspapers are starting to look for other solutions (including the Washburn Review). In our case, we haven't identified a solution yet, and we're stuck in our contract until the spring anyway.
You CAN make College Publisher work for you though. Although it can be frustrating, I am fairly happy with what we have working for our paper. The key is making your content fit the system. Really, the system should fit the content, but this is what we have to work with.
If you look at the picture in the sidebar section, you'll notice that the picture of the two women walking has a misplaced caption. This is caused by the picture not filling the column-- if you take care when sizing photos, you can avoid these problems. It took some trial and error to figure out that our pictures need to be 375px wide, but it was worth the effort.
Another key is to recognize that College Publisher is not made for multimedia--the built in video player is...crap. If you are going to produce video, host it on Youtube or blip.tv and embed the player in your article. I like blip.tv, it seems like a classier Youtube.
Finally, don't use the auto-resize feature for your photos! College Publisher does not resample at a very high quality, so you'll notice some serious pixelation if you don't resize manually in Photoshop or Preview or whatever you use...
If you haven't been one of the lucky ones (haha) to upgrade to College Publisher 5, or you aren't ready to make the switch to another content management system, you can make CP4 work for you.
Do you have tips or questions? Leave them in the comments!
