New.Journalism.Review

WORDPRESS FOR A "NEWS" SITE?

WordPress
just seems to be getting better and better all the time. Like Joomla!,
WordPress is free and there is plenty of online community support. 

Like many people, I thought that WordPress only produced sites that look like blogs. In fact designers have been coming up with templates that look like news sites for ages (and really sexy-looking news sites as well). Perfect for any small business, charity or university student project.

SOME GOOD WORDPRESS TEMPLATES FOR NEWS SITES:

• Revolution 2 Theme

• Bram.us (list of newsy WordPress templates).

WHAT'S GOOD ABOUT WORDPRESS FOR NEWS SITES:

• I use WordPress for a site that is used by Level 1 students.  It
  allows me to introduce students to the idea of the CMS and how
  information is organised online.
• WordPress allows multiple users 
• The WordPress interface is far more intuitive than Joomla! (more on that later).
• Like Joomla! it has loads of great extensions/ add-ons / widgets – whatever you want to call 'em!

WHAT'S NOT-SO-GOOD

• Poor categorisation - WordPress only has a shallow hierarchy
  for organising stories. You can  file stories into main categories, but
  that's about it. I don't believe (and I could be wrong) there is not
  the deep level of sub-categories you get in Joomla!
• Adding sections to the navigation bar – This involves
  a trip into 'template manager' and you need to make changes to the
  code. In this area, one tiny slip or mistake and you are sunk. In
  Joomla!, it's very easy to adjust menus headings using menu manager.
• Manage Posts in WordPress is weak – compared to article manager in Joomla! You can't sort posts or unpublish through this manage posts section (you have to go into each article – correction. This is now solved). When you have hundreds of posts and you need to locate some information, this can be a problem!

Links:
Creating a student journalism site on a tight budget – using WordPress to create a news site.
NewsWire.NZ - what can be achieved using a fantastic WordPress template.
WordPress a CMS for Journalists (Andy Dickinson) 

Templates are a series of files which control the presentation of content (articles that you create). So you want an attractive looking news site to match that of CNN.com, but at the fraction of the price? Well, this page will help.

When
you install Joomla!, you will see that your site has a default
template which is pretty ugly-looking.  It also contains
dummy articles full of text about Joomla! – eventually you will want to
delete these articles as well, but don’t do it now.

CREATING A TEMPLATE YOURSELF

This
isn’t particularly easy for the non-coders of the world. You need to know
about CSS and PHP. You can’t just use Dreamweaver to create a
dynamically-generated page.

If you are into creating a template yourself then you  need to get hold of a books by Dan Rahmel (widely available on Amazon).

These
books explain how to create a template yourself. But I have a feeling
that even if you spent a month following this  advice, you still
wouldn’t have a site that looked as nice as one of the professionally produced
templates listed beneath.

ASK A WEB DEVELOPER TO CREATE A TEMPLATE

Choosing a good web developer isn’t  easy – see questions to ask a designer

You need to be very precise about how you brief developers / Joomla! designers. A precise brief will save a lot of heartache later on.

What you need you designer to do is: negotiate design concept with you (i.e. what it will look like). They will then go off and create appropriate screenshots, graphics, icons and then install the template on your server and
configure it. It obviously helps if you have existing art work (e.g. company logos) that you can supply.

You need to ensure that your freelance designer (or web design company) has experience in creating Joomla! templates and they have a solid online portfolio of work with previous clients.

They obviously need to have knowledge of MySQL, CSS and PHP. It is well worth posting a job on freelance sites like PeopleByTheHour.com or Elance. You get a mix of design students (who may do you a template for free if helps them build a portfolio) to Web professionals.  It doesn’t really matter where in the world the developer is based – most things can be explained via email or over the phone.

INSTALLING A FREE JOOMLA! TEMPLATE

There are a lot of people who
are willing to give away their lovely template designs for you to use
for free.

You will find a bewildering array of free options at Joomla! 24 or Best of Joomla!

The
more recent templates will be specially written for Joomla! 1.5 ( the
latest version of the CMS, although 1.6 will appear soon). You can use older templates (not written
for version 1.5), but they may only work in legacy mode – which is very easy to set up.

A few free templates that would be okay for a pretty basic news site:

• CB-SAND (for Joomla! 1.1) – FREE. This is obviously a bit old now, but I found it very easy to tweak it to create a nice looking template for a news site.
• Themza FREE- I use this for a sports site . Two really good sports news templates
• Mistra Blue – it looks a bit like the website of the Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera.
• DaBronze – FREE
• DailyPraise – FREE
• Phoca – a series of good free templates

There is no reason why you shouldn’t download and install a few. You can then play around with the positioning of modules.

In Joomla! go to extensions – install / uninstall and upload it.

Go to template manager to make your newly installed template default.

PAID-FOR JOOMLA! TEMPLATES (AND CLUBS)

Some really nice news templates…

• Sportsline and Newsline (YouJoomla!) – LOVELY!
• IT Newsy (Ice Theme)
  
• The News II (Gavik)
  
• NewsLink
• Media Mogul (Rocket Theme)
• JSN Epic (two versions Basic = free Pro = paid-for)
• Magazine Plaza (From Template Plaza)

You can usually buy the templates separately, but if you feel you need ongoing support, often via email or message boards, you may want to join a template club. This will usally give you access to other templates by the same company.

Joomla! Club Membership Costs
(these are the cheapest membership packages/correct at time of writing):

YouJoomla!
$45 for 3 months membership

Ice Theme
$49 / 3 months

Gavik
$51 / 4 months

Rocket Theme
$50 / 2 months

Template Plaza
$39 / 4 Months access

A few things about the paid-for / template clubs:

1. These
templates are dead sexy and do include lots of pre-installed modules
and plugins. For those that are relatively new to Joomla!, they will
suggest doing a clean-install. I.e. you install the version of Joomla!
they provide, which also includes all the modules/plugins you need.

2. Some of these services, like YouJoomla!, will install their templates to  your server space for you.

3.
Check what you are getting. With some sites you can download individual
templates for around $25,  but that can be poor value for money in the
long run. You may only get limited tech/forum support and it may not
include all the modules you need.

So you have decided to choose Joomla! for your news site? (good choice!). Most commercial web hosts will host Joomla! for you. And if you go with one that offers the Fantastico suite of software, you will be able to install Joomla! in just one-click.  

NOT SURE YOU LIKE JOOMLA!? – THEN HAVE A FREE TEST

If you want to have a play around with Joomla for free – you can find it hosted at Jhost .  It doesn’t allow you to upload your own template, but it does allow you to play around and understand the interface. Or you can also have a play at the official Joomla! Demo Site.

CHOOSING A HOME FOR YOUR JOOMLA! SITE

To host Joomla! you don’t need a lot – just a webserver that supports MySQL and PHP. Both WordPress and Joomla! are written in a scripting langauge known as PHP.

Most news sites these days are not static-HTML, but are dynamic. MySQL refers to the database that is at the heart of the CMS. You don’t need to know a lot about this stuff, only that your hosting company supports it. 

You probably won’t be able to host it with
the free space you get with your ISP account. 

INSTALLING JOOMLA!

Take a look at -How to start a Joomla! site

 Downloaded the latest version of Joomla!.

BUDGET  UK JOOMLA! HOSTING COMPANIES

1. 1&1: You will probably need One and One Business package
2. Heart Internet: One-Click install of Joomla! and  WordPress on the Starter Package
3. FastHosts: Probably will need the Developer package

BUDGET  US JOOMLA! HOSTING COMPANIES
1. GoDaddy: The economy plan one-click install at $4.99 a month
2. ZZ Hosting: The $3.90 budget plan has one-click install for Joomla!
3. SiteGround: The $5.95 a month package offers one-click install for Joomla! SiteGround also has an impressive list of templates (see next page)

The story of my early attempts to find a host can be found here

A NEWS SITE USING PRiNZ  BranfordMagazine 2.51

I  created a news site for L1 students using WordPress and  PRiNZ BranfordMagazine 2.51 template. From a user perspective it looks pretty good, although it’s less flexible than Joomla! at the back-end.

There are many other news-stye templates that you can tailor to meet your needs. (See Revolution 2 Theme and Bram.us has a good list of others). 

SUPPORT FOR THOSE USING THE TEMPLATE

1. The creator of the template runs a support forum (this does not take any new support requests, but the database is searchable).

2. Download the excellent e-book – Sites that Soar

KEY STAGES FOR CREATING A SITE USING BRANFORD

The stages I went through to get the site right are roughly:

1. Change the website header (Logo),
You need to do this in Joomla! as well. So you need to find the name of the existing header graphic in the template files (it is known as bg-branding.png) and it’s exactly 625 pixels w x 100 pixels h.Then go into Photoshop and create your own version. Finally, upload your logo to the same folder that has bg-branding.png.

2. Navigation bars
There is a primary navigation bar that appears horizontally beneath the website header. To add sections to this you simply create a page (NOT A POST). This will be automatically added to the navigation bar.

The secondary navigation runs vertically on the left of the page.  It orders posts according to categories   It is not standard to have a nav bar on the left for a news site (it’s more common with blogs). You would normally have the nav bar on the right.

You need to understand that categories in WordPress have IDs. To get categories to appear in the left navigation bar, you need to type these numbers into the template code.  Annoyingly WordPress 2.5 hides IDs. That said, it’s possible to get them to appear again, but you will need to download a plugin which is appropriately called Reveal IDs for WP Admin

5. Joomla! has module positions and Brandford has its own  positions
Now is the time to write  some posts (i.e. create some news articles). You will then categorise these and these categories will appear in various positions on the front page.

The positions on the front page are:

• Lead Article (this is what appears beneath the tabbed section).
• Featured articles
• Right Column Articles

As with the left nav bar, you have to type in the ID numbers of the categories containing content that you want to appear in each position.

ADDING IMAGES TO THE FRONT PAGE

It’s easy to get an image to go with a post, but you will also want any story that appears on the front page to have an image as well. Unlike in Joomla!, the WordPress does not take
the imagefront the post and stick it on the front page.

Instead any images you want to appear on the front page must appear in the CustomFields section of the post. 

This is a complicated process. There is no easy way to change the order of what appears on the front page (to get a headline story, you need to change the date on the post to make it the newest). Joomla! has front page manager which exists soley so adminstrators can order front page content.

CONCLUSION: 

WordPress is great for blogs and seems to be getting better all the time. But you may well outgrow WordPress quite quickly if you use it for a news site.

So you’ve installed Joomla! CMS on a server – well done! But the bare CMS alone isn’t going to be that useful. It really is just an empty shell that needs to be tailored for your particular needs. This process will involve the installation of a template (or perhaps a few templates), working out sections and categories and installation of extensions.

HERE COMES SUPER-ADMINISTRATOR

Sites have a front-end (which is, for the purpose of this explanation, your publicly available site) and the back-end which is your CMS – Joomla!

As we have said before, the art of a good site is to have a  front – end with content that changes regularly and a back-end database stacked full of content.

You don’t want any Tom, Dick or Harry accessing your precious database, so you need to have protected

You will be  given super-administrator status (it’s a great title!) when you install Joomla! (you can always change your password). Basically, you can do anything to the CMS, including taking your site offline completely. You can have more than one super-administrator. You can also  give super-administrator status to whoever you want, just make sure you trust them not to mess with the site when they are drunk.

GIVING ACCESS TO OTHERS

To access anything to do with usernames/passwords go to: Site – User Manager - New

Joomla! has two main hierarchies for User Groups: one for access to the
Front-end (so users can log in to the web site and view designated
sections and pages) and one for Back-end Administration access.

The default groups provided are:

Public Front-end
| —- Registered
| ——– Author
| ————- Editor
| ——————- Publisher

Administrator Back-end
| ——- Manager
| ————- Administrator
| ——————- Super Administrator

The front-end bit allows your site to work in some respects as a wiki – so users can edit content. There is the  login form (this may be published by default when you install a template)  which allows people to login to contribute to your site.

Personally, my site isn’t a wiki and I don’t have the login form published. I have my 40 (or so) students sign up for Back-End Adminstrator status. This allows students to do pretty much everthing except change the template or pull the site off-line.