Max Cutler, Andrew Spittle, Mo Jangda, Eric Eldon, and Drew Geraets joined me on Skype this morning to discuss different ideas for improving the WordPress admin for newsrooms. The audio has our entire conversation, which had a number of really legit ideas, but I’d like to share some of the core takeaways.
One, there’s big opportunity to build functionality into the WP dashboard that offers a stream, or river rather, of data about the activity going on with the website. This type of information might include data on posts that have new statuses, posts that need editing, authors logging in and out of the CMS, or new comments from the community. The user’s exposure to this river of data would be dependent on the people they’re “following” (i.e. if they’re a sports reporter then they’d be following the section editor and other beat reporters) and their area of expertise (sports vs. A&E vs. environment). A few intermediate steps to getting to this point are building the functionality to aggregate activity within WordPress (which something like Audit Trail already has pieces of), creating an RSS pipe of the information, and then building the interface in the admin that would either live on the dashboard or near it. Eventually, it could even become as complex as the new Friendfeed Beta.
There were other ideas presented in the call that would be lower hanging fruit and could, at the same time, help support this stream of activity idea. One was to implement more statuses (beyond Draft and Pending Review) that can be associated with a post or, at the same time, making those statuses customizable. Another would be a box in the sidebar of the post editing screen where you could leave notes about the post (like which sections still need work, needs an image, etc.) When the author passed the post off, that note would be one of the types of metadata to go into the admin river of data.
Drew had an idea to give reporters the ability to make pitches for new stories, and then have those pitches managed by WordPress. I think this could be another instance where the ability to use custom fields would be useful. New pitches could simply be new story drafts, but there would be fields for the concept, proposed number of hours to report, etc.
Based on the participation in the call, there certainly is interest in a code project to add additional newsroom functionality to the WordPress admin. I think the best approach forward would be to continue developing the basic ideas (which, to me, are improved functionality around creating content, better user roles and management, and then visualizing the aggregate of that data) over the next couple of weeks and then drafting a spec and timeline.
One idea I missed was Andrew’s desire to be able to associate more information with an author (i.e. Skype name, personal blog, Publish2, etc.) so that the information could be used on the front end and back end. For instance, the author profile page on the live site would show the author’s most recent Publish2 links. It would also use the Skype or Jabber information to show you whether the author was online or not if you were editing the post and needed feedback.
All great ideas! I love the stream concept. Ideally, it would be great if it was accessible from the dashboard.
I’d love to see some kind of Google-spreadsheet type functionality on the back end too. We track all our articles’ progress through a complex spreadsheet that includes info like upcoming articles, which photog is assigned, deadline, supplementary multimedia + much more (13 columns on the spreadsheet in total)– and by the time it gets to WP, there are additional columns for the copy editors to “sign off” after they edit. After the third copy editor views the article, the section editor, EIC, ME or I can publish.
This is where the status concept would make life 10x easier. One of the biggest web-first problems we have is trying to figure out who’s read over the articles and whether they’re ready to be published. If there was a “notes” box located on the right column, copy editors could sign off and leave their remarks on the side, section editors could let us know if he/she wants more info from the reporter… oh I could go on and on about how many problems that’d solve.
Andrew Spittle also mentions he’s doing a lot of copying and pasting– we have a lot of that too. Copy editors compose their articles directly into WP and print designers copy and paste from WP to inDesign. If changes are made in inDesign, then that article is pasted back into WP, which is a huge pain when it comes to retaining hyperlinks. I don’t know what the exact solution would be (besides slashing print) but there needs to be a way to reduce redundancy.
Thanks for a great discussion and great ideas!
Thanks for posting this Daniel. One idea that I had after the call was that it would be sweet to be able to limit the stream and notes concepts to certain levels of users.
Sure, notes on an article might be really useful to an editor, but it might be unnecessary or even bad to have them available to every contributor. This way they could (don’t have to be, but could) be used as a method for editors to communicate with each other about the strengths/weaknesses/problems with articles.
I just had another idea: a chat. Imagine if it functioned like Gmail’s or Facebook’s chat. It would remain in the bottom of the window and whenever someone logs into the back-end, they appear online. Imagine how convenient collaboration would be with that function.
@Lauren That would be a great feature. I think it would be particularly helpful if a newsroom were moving to writing articles within Wordpress. This would allow reporters to write from anywhere and still communicate with editors, etc. easily.