Setting up a college newspaper Web site

  • egable

    (@egable)


    14 years, 8 months ago

    Hi,

    I’m working with a college newspaper staff on setting up a new Web site, and I’m hoping somebody who’s been in a similar situation can help. (Right now, I have a dummy site up at http://www.erikgable.com/wordpress.)

    The problems I’ve encountered so far:

    — WordPress seems to insist that a post can only have one author. On a news site, it’s entirely possible that two writers will share a byline. Is there any way to make this feasible?

    — Although I can set the author of a post to be someone other than the person who’s actually posting it (this is essential because while many reporters will be writing stories, a smaller number of editors will be posting them), there doesn’t seem to be a “change author” option on the “New Post” screen … if I want to change the author to someone other than the person posting it, I have to submit the post, then go back and edit it.

    — Plus, having to create an account for every single person you ever want to give a byline to seems kind of kludgy.

    — The “My Category Order” plugin only seems to work with a minority of the themes I’ve tried. The rest just display my categories in alphabetical order and ignore the order I’ve set up in MCO.

    — Many news themes don’t seem to acknowledge the fact that not every story will have an image attached to it. If a story doesn’t happen to have a photo, I don’t want it to show up with a huge “You must upload an image!” box next to it. Sorry, but some stories have photos and some don’t. (Also, looking at demos of premium sites, it looks like some of them actually crop — or worse, stretch — images to make them fit a predetermined shape. Some pics will be horizontal and some vertical — the theme needs to accommodate that.)

    I’ve tried about two dozen free themes and looked into a number of the premium newspaper themes as well, but don’t want to buy a premium theme only to discover that it leaves many of the problems unsolved.

    Does anybody know if these issues have resolutions, and can anybody recommend a theme — whether free or premium — that seems like it would work for this project?

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  • Thread Starter egable

    (@egable)

    14 years, 8 months ago

    (Please disregard the question about My Category Order — the Category Order plugin seems to work.)

    @mercime

    (@mercime)

    14 years, 8 months ago

    WordPress seems to insist that a post can only have one author.

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/co-authors/

    “change author” option on the “New Post” screen

    If you have more than one user registered in your blog there is a dropdown for authors in Posts > Add New – Panel – look down the screen

    can anybody recommend a theme — whether free or premium — that seems like it would work for this project?

    I’m of the school that believes the theme is dependent on the content or content structure, rather than vice versa.

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