WordPress as your Web authoring tool

I’ve been pimping free WordPress blogs as the way to get started online for journalist bloggers, journalism educators, and students for months now (ever since I migrated this blog to WordPress, in fact). Most people will be content (even happy) with a free blog hosted at WordPress.com. (Real geeks, on the other hand, can download and install WordPress on their own Web server.)

Recently I have started recommending that folks look at WordPress as their first CMS (content management system) for an online publication. Not big daily newspapers, mind you! But for a lot of smaller and less demanding publications, as well as micro sites, having a free and open-source CMS (with a dependable MySQL back-end) has a lot of benefits. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel — you can get a fully functioning wheel, with extras, for free!

Now, my friend Craig is sure to hop in here and sing the praises of Textpattern, and he’s entitled; he’s built several publication sites in Textpattern. Recently he mentioned that when designing a publication in TextPattern, he doesn’t have to wrangle with PHP script. I thought for a moment and then asked, “Did I have to wrangle PHP when I built my WordPress templates?” Honestly, I had forgotten all about it. I don’t actually know PHP, but I know the fundamentals of JavaScript, and I guess it just didn’t seem as grueling as getting the stupid CSS margins to come out the same in IE 6 and IE 7 (that was the hard part!). Craig’s no weakling when it comes to scripting, but he evaluated both and decided there’s less script wrangling in Textpattern.

Having done the wrangling and since forgotten all about it, I’m recommending WordPress.

So, more to the point — which WordPress theme works best for a publication site?

Themes are like templates — ready-made designs that you can choose and use for your WordPress site. You don’t have to roll your own, like I did — in fact, most people select a ready-made theme from the huge online repository. Most themes are free, just like WordPress itself. If you get tired of the one you’ve got, you can quickly switch to a new one.

Some themes, however, have been developed for professional use. The most popular of these for commercial publishing are the Revolution themes by Brian Gardner. Prices range from $80 (for use of one theme on a single Web site) to $400 (for all-you-can-eat and all seven variants of the Revolution theme). To install a theme like Revolution, you must install WordPress on your own server (you cannot use the version hosted at WordPress.com).

If you’re wondering why I am touting WordPress and not Drupal or Django, read this earlier post. People I respect hugely (such as Matt Waite) swear by Django. If you want to totally roll your own application, go for it. But if you merely want to launch a frequently updated publication (or any other kind of informational Web site), at least give WordPress a fair look. (As I said, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel!)

You can read about how the j-school at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada, adopted the Revolution news theme for its student publications, including The Thunderbird. The Cal State Fresno student newspaper, The Collegian Online, is also in WordPress.

More resources

For a free WordPress theme designed for publications, see The Morning After, by Arun Kale.
There is a list of WordPress themes suitable for use by an online magazine.
To browse screenshots of 100 WP themes organized by type (e.g., magazine themes), see the post at Smashing Magazine.
You can view all of my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged WordPress and CMS.

Benefits for journalism educators

If you assign each student to set up and use a free WordPress blog, the students will get experience using a CMS that’s not radically different from those used in most newspaper newsrooms today.

You can also assign some enhancements or additional tasks to get the students to conquer their fear of scripting and software.

For teachers and professors, starting up your own blog can be a great way to organize your communications with students. No more lost e-mails! Some educators are publishing their full syllabus and all assignments on WordPress (or Blogger) blogs. You don’t need to wait for someone to show you how to do it. Honestly, it’s self-explanatory once you click the “Get Started” button.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4, 2008, at 7:31 am and is filed under workflow, tools, online, journalism, blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

21 responses to “WordPress as your Web authoring tool”

Craig writes:

I won’t quite take the comment bait and run as hard as you thought I might. (Dear readers, Mindy warned me over lunch yesterday that she was going to comment-bait me today.)

I have built sites with both WordPress and Textpattern and can point out a few things.
- It’s easier to apply someone else’s theme in WordPress, but it’s easier to build your own in Textpattern. (Because WordPress themes are stored as files and Textpattern themes are stored in the database.)
- I’ve seen very non-techy novices pick up the Textpattern authoring UI right away. You log in and you’re at the “Write an article” screen, no further clicks necessary. WordPress only requires one click, but that’s more than none.
- Textpattern has a very publication-oriented concept of “sections” and it’s author-privilege hierarchy is dead-on right out of the box.
- Both are happy to let you have content on your site that is not managed by the CMS. (The top complaint I hear from users saddled with a closed CMS.) You can even run both for different areas of the same site (which I do).
If you are building an online publication and are shopping for a free and open content management system, you are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t at least give Textpattern a good look before diving into something else.

Once, a long time ago now, before I really knew Textpattern, I built a news area for a large web site in WordPress. After helping someone else set up a test news site in Textpattern in a nearly simultaneous timeframe, I scrapped the WordPress site after about two weeks and rebuilt it with Textpattern.

Dave has now built as many, or more, sites in Textpattern as I have, maybe he’ll chime in too.
March 4, 2008 at 9:20 am
Dave Stanton writes:

A double bait! Although I heavily read, I’m an infrequent commenter. Since Craig asked, I’ll add a little bit of my experience with teaching CMS development to journalism students.

Textpattern’s admin interface works near perfectly as a content-entry platform. I can give students a 45-minute demo, and they can input stories, photos, hook in multimedia assets and pass stories through our copyediting workflow. WordPress is very intuitive for content-entry as well. I run WordPress sites for summer high school programs. I just hook up a template and go.

However, I need a lot more control and flexibility for site development with students. As Craig mentioned, all the templating is stored in the database (i.e. Web accessible). I can just grant permissions to students, and they can immediate start creating new article output forms or other structural elements. CSS is just as simple. If I need to get into the business logic (which is very, very rare), I can connect to the server and works with the stored files. For students, it is tremendously useful to let them have free reign of the structure and style without the opportunity to muck up the business logic.

My favorite thing about Textpattern is that it helps when I want and stays out of my way when I want. I can use plugins for multimedia, or I can build my own players and pass values in via custom fields associated with articles. For freelance jobs, I often install Textpattern just in case the client wants to hook up a blog. And it gives me a very easy Web interface to edit practically everything without having to carry FTP account info from computer to computer. I work on several computers each day, so this is very convenient.

Here’s an example of a site students put together in a couple months:

http://www.jou.ufl.edu/pubs/onb/F06/index.php?s=features

I hooked up the JavaScript effects, but the five students did all of the design and a lot of the article form output by themselves.

If I just need a blog, WordPress is a bit faster to grab a template and get going immediately. But if I might need to add other components, Textpattern gives me all of the flexibility I need. I can’t think of a situation that the system has hindered me.

Eventually, I would love to use Python/Django to build a CMS specifically for converged student publications. But the super-easy config and tremendous flexibility of Textpattern helps me give students a realistic experience not only inputting content but actually templating and setting up the output with an enterprise-caliber CMS.
March 4, 2008 at 9:54 am
Kate Martin writes:

I’ve been using Wordpress for a video gaming Web site I’m running and I’m really happy about it. (note: the blog is not linked from my personal Web site. video gaming is still for nerds as far as most people are concerned). It’s really low maintenance and easy to modify.

Thank you for the suggestions in the past Mindy.

As far as my personal site, I don’t blog there as much as I should. I don’t really find myself that interesting. But I blog at my video gaming site almost daily. Should I be concerned about that? You say we should blog about every day if we can to get into the practice.
March 4, 2008 at 10:11 am
Bryan Murley writes:

Mindy, there are some limitations with wordpress.com that should be mentioned. You can’t change the theme css or php files unless you pay a fee. Also, at one point last year they didn’t have support for iframes (I think that may have changed).

For educators, there’s also the edublog service - http://edublogs.org/ - which uses WP MU and gives free blogs to educators.
March 4, 2008 at 10:12 am
Mindy writes:

@Bryan: Thanks for the link to edublogs! That’s new to me.

Most educators and journalists I know would never dream of changing the theme CSS or PHP files — thus I do not see that as a detriment at all. The widgets take some getting used to, but once you figure it out, it’s really a cinch to customize your sidebar(s) in WordPress.

@ Craig and Dave S.: Thanks for all the good details about Textpattern. You two ought to write a book!
March 4, 2008 at 10:25 am
Craig writes:

We could call our book “Textpattern Journalism.”
March 4, 2008 at 10:51 am
Mindy writes:

Re: “Textpattern Journalism” — good title!

Or maybe … “Textpattern for Journalists”?
March 4, 2008 at 11:19 am
» WordPress para publicações writes:

[…] JÁ AQUI falei várias vezes no tema, mas este post de Mindy McAdams faz um excelente resumo que é preciso guardar: WordPress as your Web authoring tool. […]
March 4, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Patrick Beeson writes:

@Dave Stanton

I’m an adjunct with the University of Tennessee department of journalism, and we’re using a CMS that was built using Django. You can check out the source on Google Code, in fact.

I’m curious what the performance limits are with both WordPress and TextPattern. I’ve seen a number of Drupal instances fold under heavy load, though all can be made better with caching.
March 4, 2008 at 1:48 pm
pluto-online editor’s blog » Blog Archive » Anyone can publish, starting a good looking news website can be easy writes:

[…] tips from Mindy McAdams here on how to use WordPress to create your own small-scale news website. So if you’ve ever thought about setting up your […]
March 4, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Dave Stanton writes:

@Patrick Beeson

I haven’t bothered doing a lot of quantitative performance testing. And I have no idea of what the out-of-the-box performance comparisons might be between Drupal, WordPress and Textpattern. It all depends on an individual configuation. We serve video from a streaming server. The load performance could be much different if serving multimedia and pages from the same server. And you need to take into account the number and types of CSS files, JavaScript files, background images, etc. I try to combine files, use image spriting and caching.

One of our sites, WUFT PBS Channel 5, served up the “Don’t Tase Me Bro” video through a Textpattern instance. We didn’t see any evidence of breakdown under heavy load. I consulted our web administrator, and we’ve never overloaded a site to the point of failure, as far as he recalls. I think the performance of a site is more dependent on efficient coding by the developer than by the out-of-the box CMS.
March 4, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Danny Sanchez writes:

It’s important to note that Drupal is a ready-made content management platform, while Django is a framework for developing web applications. It’s a bit apples to oranges.

Django requires plenty of programming knowledge to get started, while Drupal can be installed on a server and used almost out of the box (presuming you don’t want to do any crazy custom stuff).

Also, check out the Joomla CMS. That one is pretty cool too, and it’s open source PHP like Drupal.
March 4, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Aaron writes:

Hey Mindy,

Thanks for the post. Honestly I’ve been trying to build my own wordpress blog for a few weeks. It’s going slowly because I want it to be original and look just-so. I get daunted.

I’m going to look at Textpattern. But since I’ve started on wordpress I have to tame the beast; pride issue.
March 4, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Notes from a Teacher: Mark on Media » Rebuilding online writes:

[…] is Mindy McAdams’s WordPress as your Web authoring tool, which covers a lot of the arguments already made for WordPress and contains extensive links to […]
March 5, 2008 at 12:46 am
Craig writes:

Since we mentioned books yesterday, one that might be of interest to blog/cms platform shoppers is Blog Design Solutions by Andy Budd et al. I have a copy.
March 5, 2008 at 10:06 am
jsbadillo writes:

Hello, I,ve used BranfordMagazine template for Ciberperiodismo.org, and it’s been very usefull. I recommend it.
March 5, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Drew Geraets writes:

We’re using Wordpress for our NYCity News Service and it’s been awesome. It’s a great tool we have our students using and learning about. The biggest thing there is teaching them how to customize the layout and implementing plugins. That’s where good knowledge of xhtml/css and a familiarity with php comes in handy.
March 6, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Andy writes:

I’m running quite a few news sites using wordpress and I have to say its the easiest open source, hackable, system I’ve tried.

I’m using the Mimbo theme (http://www.ukjournalism.co.uk/newsday/) and the Vantage and Structure themes from Justin Tadlock. Great themes and his new one, Options, looks good as well.
March 6, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Scot Hacker writes:

I manage more than 30 WordPress installations for the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and 40 more for clients of my hosting service. I’ve found WP so flexible and quick to develop for that it’s become a way of life. We use it for everything from publication sites to knowledge bases and FAQs to the student handbook to blogs. And we use WP-MU when every student in a class needs a blog of their own.

TextPattern is great, but much of the key to WP’s flexibility is the enormous number of plugins available for the platform. For the upcoming Tech Training for Editors Workshop we’ll be running, we’ll have the fellows working in WP-MU. Plugins have made it easy to let them do podcasting, video embedding, audio embedding, Flash embedding, bi-directional Twitter feeding, etc. etc.

I recently managed a massive migration of China Digital Times from Movable Type to WordPress. Read about it here.

To help keep them all up to date, I check them all out via subversion rather than FTP, and keep them up to date with a simple management script I wrote.
March 18, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Mindy writes:

Thanks, Scot. I also think that the variety of plugins for WordPress puts it above the rest of the comparable options.
March 18, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Teaching Online Journalism » MVPs for March and April writes:

[…] WordPress as your Web authoring tool […]
June 5, 2008 at 7:02 am