No audio recording this week. We gave up on using Skype after 10 minutes of pain and decided to daisy chain cell phones together instead. Joining me on the call were Greg, Will, Sam, Andrew, Albert, and Lauren for a bit.
Andrew started things off by discussing our hosting outreach efforts. Rather than randomly emailing people, we’ve decided to start focusing our efforts on who we think are the most likely candidates for a upgrade to WordPress. Related to Managed Hosting, Albert finally got rsync to start backing up sites on WebFaction which means that I will no longer have to do backups by hand. It was just another line to the backup script we already have running.
We had a bit of discussion about the theme design services that we offer because we actually have our first client that hopes to relaunch by the beginning of next term. There are a couple of concerns we have with trying to do a theme design over winter break. Most importantly, we’ll need regular and prompt feedback on the iterations of the design to launch on time. This may prove difficult over the holidays. Our goal is going to be to have the first iteration of the design done in the next three weeks, and then have a “working” theme ready for launch (in five weeks). Refinements to the design will be made in the couple of weeks after launch. If this timeline works out over the holidays, then five to six weeks in general will be a good amount of time for doing a normal theme design.
Albert brought up the Knight News Challenge as a potential source of funding for some of the project ideas we have. I intend to start working on an informal application for the Edit Flow Project. We’ve already done a significant amount of development on it, and intend to continue working on it, but the funding could potentially be for the functionality idea we have to make the pitching process open if the news organization so desires.
We’ve started using Highrise for contract management amongst the hosting and business teams with mostly good results. The contact and company management functionality is really cool, it helps us keep all of that information in one place, and the deals functionality works alright for our needs. It’s mostly useful for keeping track of the potential deals we have on the table. The tasks functionality, unfortunately, isn’t of any use because we’re already using Basecamp for that, but it would be very slick if Highrise integrated with Basecamp. Also, if we reliably bcc all of our email conversations into Highrise, it will be really useful months from now when we run into the question of “when did we talk to that client last?”
Greg and I recorded an epic College Media Lab last night with Sean Blanda and Christopher Wink about News Inkubator. Look for it on Wednesday.
The whole goal of the Edit Flow Project was to build a bunch of different pieces in to WordPress that made the editorial workflow side of things a lot more seamless. Mo said he’s back in the game so we’re going to start working on some of the most requested features: email notifications and post-specific editorial comments.
In an email, Andrew Spittle said that, for the Whitman Pioneer:
The most important thing that I see from our end would be the ability to designate editors for specific sections/categories and have them sent email updates (single or digest) of the activity in their section. I think that of everything that would turn it into something that creates an online workflow for us instead of just an online place to do work (I hope that distinction kind of makes sense). Another thing that’d be great (perhaps you’ve already implemented this…I haven’t been keeping track of updates) would be the notes feature that we talked about at the beginning of the project. If this is done in a smooth and user-friendly way than I think that editors and reporters alike would be more inclined to use it. Also, if the notes are custom fields in the post then it would be kind of cool to be able to pull these out and display them.
Daniel Randolph wants to see “something like edit flow has where we have custom statuses that say ‘needs edited’ and things of that nature.” In addition, specific notifications to pre-defined people when a post hits a particular status is important.
Continue reading ‘Mid-August Edit Flow update: Email notifications and editorial comments’
If you aren’t subscribed already, I highly recommend listening to the most recent version of Rebooting the News. Dave and Jay talk a bit more about the concept of a virtual assignment desk, something I very much hope the Edit Flow Project can be a foundation for. If we can get newsrooms to manage their story assignments within WordPress, then it’s a more logical step to offer the ability to open that information up and have the community contribute to it.
Mo Jangda, Andrew Spittle, and I had a short conference call yesterday to discuss two things: one, how labor is going to be divided on the project, and two, how we’re going to split up work for the first stage of Edit Flow, custom statuses. Mo has done a good job on outlining the technical design for stage one, although it looks as though we’re probably going to have to break into some private WordPress functions.
In the next few days, I’m going to get the shell of the plugin up on GitHub so that everyone can start working on different parts. I’m going to work on writing a function that will tap into and alter WordPress core statuses, and Mo will do the plugin settings page. Andrew is going to start mocking up stage two because there isn’t too much UI stuff that needs to be done now.
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