Video

Ironically enough, video was the easiest thing to deal with. We opted for Blip.tv as our host and followed their instructions for formatting, achieving very good technical quality. Having a single user at Blip.tv for the whole class actually works as an online TV channel for our magazine, which allows RSS sindication of the audiovisual material and adds visibility to our website.

Installing the Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin on WordPress we were able to use a very simple tag generated by Blip.tv (check for the “WordPress” option on the orange buttons on the right of the video page). Advantage is that the tag works both in the visual and HTML views of the CMS, which is crucial, as you’ll soon see.

Audio

We could not use Blip.tv for audio, as Viper’s plugin needs to set a video width and height and shows a black screen for the audios. Therefore we opted for a WordPress buit-in option. First, we needed to enable the upload of files to the server. Any FTP program should allow you to change the writing privileges of the folder you want to use to store your media (777 is the key you want to set) so that WP can send files from the post form without you having to use FTP everytime (which would be a burden for the reporters).

You upload MP3 files using the audio option of the “add media” icons at the top of the main text form in WP. One option is to embed the audio in the text, as a link. To do that you should use the word that acts as a link as the “title” of the audio in the audio form. A more elegant option is to embed a player between two paragraphs of text. To do that, you should have installed the WP-FLV plugin. Once you have uploaded the audio file, go to the HTML view of the post form and press the FLV button. You need the URL of the file (generated when you uploaded it), and should set the height to 0 so that only the player controls show. The downside of this option is that it generates html code that will be destroyed by WP if you switch back to visual view in the post form. Stupid but true.

Photos

This should be the easiest, but is actually the trickiest because WP is very flexible with photos. I have tried to convince my students to give photos the publication size (using a photo editor) before uploading them and then select “full size” in the upload options to guarantee that we control that aspect. Left and right alignment do not always work, may be a template issue.

In Mimbo (the one I opted to use), putting photos on the homepage requires adding a “Image” custom field with the name of the image file that you need to upload by FTP to a specific folder in the theme folder. Sounds cumbersome, but as the homepage is something that only one person at a given edition will be doing you can have the FTP set up in Dreamweaver on a specific computer and have the student-editor get there to upload the pictures, resized to fit the homepage requisites.

Text

Students tend to write on MS Word and cut and paste their texts into the post form. I need to remind them all the time to switch to the HTML view before pasting, because the visual view keeps MS tags that alter the format of the text and end up being a mess.

Homepage

Once all stories have been posted, it is time to generate the homepage. This is quite a bit of manual work, because we are trying to fool WP -designed to post stories in the homepage in inverted chronological order- to order the stories as we please. WP lets you edit the index.php template right from the CMS admin interface, and that’s what you do to get your customized homepage.

The key is knowing the id number of the categories of your publication (check them in the “Manage>Categories” page). To speed up production, you should create two “hidden” categories (use the Category Visibility-iPeat Rev plugin to hide them from the main website menu): “Main Story” and “Features”. You can asign these categories to the stories you want to show in the first position and the left column, respectively. Just need to make sure the ids in the template match the numbers of the categories you created. These are the stories where you will add the “Image” custom field with photos for the homepage.

For the right column, you may want to always keep the same sections/categories (this way you don’t need to edit the template everytime) or change them over time. Both left and right columns may be edited in the template to show more or less stories. They obviously pick up the latest published in the selected categories. The result is quite convincing and management can be reduced to a minimum.

Conclusion: It was a nice pedagogic experience for the students, that learned that CMSs are not always designed to suit their needs. But I had the feeling that there should be something else in the open-source world that would be more user friendly in the backend. That’s why I am intending to use WordPress. It was originally designed to manage weblogs, but the huge improvements of their lastest version and the precedent of some college news projects using it encouraged me to try it out.

Next step: finding a newsy template. There have already been some discussions about open-source CMS options and, specifically, WordPress templates for news portals, but first-hand experience is a must to make a decision. Here is what I have learned after installing and playing around a bit with four WP themes (I could not download Revolution News, as the purchase process gets stuck on Firefox and Safari in my Mac… will add it if I get around this problem):

Gridlock

The theme has not been updated recently, and that may be a problem in the long run. It is very handy that options are integrated into the WP admin panel, but they are very scarce, in the end. You can only hand-pick the three top stories. There are no instructions to customize the template and it does not support widgets (a useful WP feature that lets you drag and drop features to the sidebar). Moreover, the layout is optimized for 800px screen width, a very old-fashioned look right now.

The Morning After

The homepage has some customizable spots, but it is pretty rigid: It allows to highlight a story below the latest (which cannot be chosen). Also, lets you include short text announcements, not very handy for news stories. There is a nice systematic how-to page, but the theme requires extensive use of FTP to take the full advantage of the layout, and uses custom fields that you need to set up in order to insert images in the homepage. Images with captions in posts can be controlled with specific HTML code to paste, which is a bit annoying. It is widget ready. Basically, it is a theme for patient, code-loving journalists, instructions are clear enough to avoid getting lost.

Mimbo

The homepage layout is quite rigid (a lead story, three featured headlines with photo and three section highlights), but very customizable tweaking the category ids in the WP theme editor (that’s messing with the code, but with the last version of WP you can do it within the admin interface, without FTPing pages). Code is well commented, helping customization, and there is a nice set of instructions in the author’s blog, but it is a bit anoying if you want to change things every time you publish. Leads in the homepage can be different from the story pages, using the standard “Excerpt” WP field. Photos in the homepage can be inserted using custom fields and uploaded via FTP, and images in posts can be controlled with specific CSS. Widget management is apparently limited to adding one to the theme sidebar, unless you hand-code.

News

This is the only theme I tested that is not free. It costs just $75 for one site, but may not be worth it, as there is no tutorial for customization and their support forum is not usually visited by their developers to answer the user questions. Code has comments to help with customization, but you feel yourself quite lonely exploring how to get things done. Apparently, you cannot control which is the leading story, that by default is the most recent. Instead, you can decide what categories to feature at the bottom of the homepage (and it will show the newest post). Not a lot of editorial control over the homepage, that’s it. The template neither allows for custom excerpts in the homepage, but with the “more” tag you can control what shows in the homepage. Photos are managed automatically, creating thumbnails for the featured articles, no need of FTP. It has a cute AJAX sidebar for latest news, comments and most popular, but it disappears if you want to add widgets.

Veredict: I will work further with Mimbo, which seems the most promising template. Will let you know if I change my mind.

Data comes to me

Since I started using Google Reader some years ago, I browse the web less and less. Surfing is old fashioned, I’m rather sit comfortably at the porch and let RSS feeds, podcasts and mashed up data come to me. I get what I want, when I want, and only go fishing for more following suggestions from my trusted sources. Yes, Google‘s search engine is also there to guide me to the unknown, but that’s anymore my main web activity. Ubiquity, one of the recent experiments at Mozilla Labs, takes this philosophy to the next step, letting users create their own mashups, combine web services wherever you are (webpage, email), to avoid what you need to do now: linking to them, browsing to them.

Apps are the browser

I couldn’t help getting an iPhone 3G. To me, its main contribution to the world is not that it makes surfing the web on a portable device doable for the first time. That’s cool, but there’s something bigger: Most iPhone apps are connected to the web and let you do tasks transparently, without the need of a browser. So, you tap on the Facebook app and do Facebook activities without having to browse to the website in Safari. May seem a small change, but when online access is (almost) everywhere (and more and more people have it) this means that browsing is not relevant anymore, the Internet becomes just a tool to perform tasks that are more powerful connected than disconnected. Mozilla Labs is also developing the concept of generating desktop apps out of websites, in the Prism project.

The browser becomes the OS

This is the most natural step if the other two mature enough. If the web is there, always, and we have intelligent apps that bring to us what we need when we need it, why do we need the OS anymore? We can have all our data online, we can have all our apps online… and load them whenever we need them. The interface then can become much more flexible and playful, touch screens (even Microsoft is working on this!) and natural language (as Ubiquity aims for) be the way to get what you want. The OS will still be there, of course, but it will be an interface manager more than anything else. Mozilla Labs have created Aurora, a prototype of a browser where the browser is “transparent”.

[Update, 16:11] I guess when I started writing this morning with the buzz about Google Chrome in the back of my mind… But did not actually mention the newcomer! Reviews previous to the release of the G-browser argue that it aims to kill Windows by letting (web) apps live a new life inside the browser. Here you have a condensed version of the comic book that Google has used to introduce the browser (it will be available for Windows later today). Reading through the comic it seems promising but just one more step towards the future of the Internet. I have come to learn that change is always slower than we expect.