A College Online Newspaper Suite as Open Source?

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?"

Comments

OpenACS

[AndyElf]

You REALLY should look at it. This is a great tool when it come to on-line community building. See at their site. FWIW, Greenpeace web site is running on it. It is fully open-sourced, supports both Oracle and PostgreSQL, has a very well-organized development process, quite detailed documentation, etc., etc., etc.

Last, but not least, they can benefit from worthy contributors.

As a let-down of sorts -- it is not PHP.

You're thinking too far inside the box

[TrebleJunkie]

(God, I hate that cliche, but it fits here.)

You're not thinking about it *big* enough.

Not only do I think you could find a market, I think you're selling yourself short thinking of only student-run university/college newpapers, and of the scope of what your application could do.

First, consider this: While there's a lot of generic content-management solutions out there in PHP, Cold Fusion, etc..., (I know. I wrote one myself.) There are few, if any that are geared towards and encompass the workflow of news publishing -- assigning stories, investigation/reporting, submitting stories, editting, fact-checking, etc... (I'm sure I'm missing a lot, because I never worked for a school paper. I'm a conservative; they wouldn't let me. ;) )

Second, consider this: A newspaper's online product is usually secondary to their print product. But a lot of smaller places, like a college or university, probably doesn't have an application to manage the print production. With the appropriate process change at the organization, and the proper sales spin, an app such as the one you wish to create could be used to manage the print creation process as well.

Third, consider this: There are a number of other potential buyers for this type of product: from High Schools or local School Districts, to small-to-medium hometown newspapers, local radio or TV stations (that are not owned by someone HUGE.) that offer their news online, Catholic Diocesan newspapers... virtually *any* organization that creates a printed newspaper and/or offers a news product on the web.
I do wish you luck. All I ask is that when these Ideas of mine *do* make you a few bucks, you send a big fat check to me at:

Ed Zahurak
121 Barnhart Street
Johnstown, PA 15905

*grin*

Reinventing the wheel

[omega9]

Someone mentioned PHP-Nuke earlier and I couldn't agree more.

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.