Montclair State University News
In fall 2007 I created a new news administration system for Montclair State University to meet the updated needs of the campus. The previous news administration system was created in 1999 and even though it was created well, it had simply become too outdated and the university needed to expand. Since the old system was fairly easy to decipher and robust (for its time) I was able to import all of the articles published in it since 1999. As a result we were able to switch over from the old system to the new system without an interruption in the availability of archived content.
The new University News system allows for multiple channels in multiple groups. Each group is meant to represent a different news section in the MSU site. Pictured above is the "General" group; this group contains articles created by Marketing & Communications and are meant to represent news about the University as a whole. The "General" group is made up of several "Channels" in the right sidebar which function like the sections of a newspaper. We provide (or plan to provide) the same front-end functionality for each of the Colleges within the University on their own semi-autonomous websites.
Articles are completely styled through CSS with identifiers for headline, byline, lead, article body, photo captions, and photo credits. This maintains a consistent look and feel from article to article without placing any extra workload on the author. The large feature photos are uploaded to the system and then automatically cropped and resized to fit within a 550x300 space.
The sidebar allows the article author to add an interior photo (that users can click to enlarge) with credit and caption, and a link to a multimedia slide-show. The multimedia slide-show can contain various types of files, including images (jpeg, gif, and png), videos (quicktime, windows media, and flash video), and audio (mp3).
This is an example of the media slide-show for a centennial celebration at the Red Hawk Diner (our on-campus 24 hour diner). Having the ability to attach various media types to the article was a special consideration to add a bit more flair to the feature articles (which are far more than mere announcements).
On the administrative side, when a user is logged in, he or she is presented with a listing of all articles currently in the system. This list can be sorted by creation date, last edit date, and last editor. The articles can also be filtered based upon the channels in which they're published.
The administrative view also includes a full text search to find articles that may be buried in the archive.
Editing the article is done through a WYSIWYG editor, and custom styles are used on the various form objects in order to have them reflect what the headline, lead, byline, etc ... will look like on screen.
Articles can be published to multiple channels in multiple groups with different priority settings for each channel. Articles are listed in order by priority, and then by date. Higher priority articles show up on top, but if they're all the same priority then they'll be sorted so that the newest article is listed first.
The multimedia slide-show is administered through a simple interface that allows the user to edit the title, caption, and credit for an item, change the order in which it appears, or delete the item. "Add Media Object" allows users to upload new files that will be displayed along with the article.
The system saves revisions of the articles each time one of them is published. If an irreversible mistake is made and published to the web, a user can restore a previous version of the article, make some minor changes, and then publish the corrected version in a very short amount of time. The current and previous revisions of the article are displayed side-by-side so that the user can make a direct comparison.
And the last item worth showing on the back-end is the user permissions page. Permissions can easily be granted or revoked with changes taking effect immediately. Users without permission to finalize articles (for example) will only be able to save drafts. They will then need to ask somebody with higher authority to review and publish the article. (Although, to be honest, since we can restrict which channels a user can post to, we haven't had the need to do this.) We can however selectively revoke or grant a user's permission to manage multimedia slide-shows, which could be important if a user starts to clog up the server.
You can view the front-end of the University News system at http://www.montclair.edu/news/.