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CMS for High School Newspaper Website?

Posted by Cliff on 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?"

9 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Bricolage by CmdrChillupa · · Score: 3, Informative

    Bricolage

    Used by Salon, MacWorld, etc.

    I started working with it for a newspaper website. It's solid, configurable and very open to design.

    1. Re:Bricolage by greechneb · · Score: 2, Informative
      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/

    2. Re:Bricolage by Paul+Bain · · Score: 2, 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, which is (I understand) equally powerful and possibly easier to install. One caveat with respect to SPIP is that, at one point, its interface and some of its documentation was mostly in French, but that may have changed by now. Otherwise, SPIP enjoys an excellent reputation.

      Other CMS's that are designed for specifically for NO's include Cofax and Props, both of which have reputations for being immature as compared to Bricolage and SPIP.

      Finally, this issue was discussed here on Slashdot about 17 months ago in a story whose title was "A College Online Newspaper Suite as Open Source?" Another relevant discussion took place on OpenSourceCMS.com just three months ago.

      --

      A lawyer & digital forensics examiner. Also an expert on open source software (OSS).
  2. Try these by mstefanus · · Score: 4, Informative

    You can try Mambo or Typo3. They are both great.

    But before making a decision, you can check OpenSourceCMS for demo of diferent CMS'. Another great comparison site is CMSMatrix

  3. Zope/Plone by uits · · Score: 2, Informative

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

  4. CollegePublisher by jtmas83 · · Score: 2, Informative

    My college's newspaper uses College Publisher. 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.

  5. Re:Drupal by Scaba · · Score: 2, Informative

    I second this. I'm not a big PHP fan, but the Drupal guys (and its cousin project CivicSpace) were very thoughtful in designing a complete drop-in but very extensible CMS framework. Plone with Archetypes 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 that turn people away.

  6. XOOPS by pjay_dml · · Score: 2, Informative

    XOOPS 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, 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 :)...

  7. eZ Publish by kosmosik · · Score: 2, Informative

    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/