Newsroom workflow ? To multisite or not? ? Large install.

  • Hi all,

    If anyone has any experience with editorial workflows, and could offer some suggestions on how to organize a newpaper’s install of wordpress – I’d appreciate you reading further.

    I started working at my student newspaper this past fall. To my horror, they’re still using Movable Type!

    My project this summer is to setup, and import, and theme the whole site for WordPress. Since a lot of the site is “hacked” together in MT, I’ll probably have to write my own custom importer.

    However, I first want to set up the site “the right way” in a blank wordpress install. Here’s the deal:

    We have various different sections of the site “News”, “Sports”, “Arts”, “Oped”, &c. There are about 6 of these total. Each section is worked on by a dedicated team of 4-5 people. Each team publish around 10-20 stories a day in each and are currently used to having their own dedicated section of the site to draft, review, and edit.

    Should I use well defined primary categories for each section? Should I split each of these into their own multisite instance? Or would that just add extra complexity? My main concern is “hiding” the Sports content form the News editors and vice versa. Other than the editorial management (who controls all sections), no one section needs access to the other.

    My main concern for multisite is:

    • Theming coming complex, as we’re going to have to integrate content from all sections in almost every page.
    • Page slowing down, as content must be pulled from multiple wp_posts tables for integrated content (homepage, for example).
    • Managing writer/authors (who might write for multiple sections) profiles.

    We do pay our employees, and have some bright student coders working on this. Feel free to suggest solutions that might have “complex” solutions.

    If anyone else has suggestions for editorial workflows (plugins, google doc integration), I’d like to make this transition as painless as possible for editors and offer as many great productivity features as possible.

    Thanks for taking the time to read & offer suggestions!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Using multisite would certainly split up your editorial staff, but you’d be splitting up everything else as well. If your goal is to divided your staff into separate editorial tracks or “silos” then you should be looking to solve that specific problem with a plugin, and there are many that could solve this problem.

    “Role Scoper” may fit your purposes here. It’s a well-maintained plugin that will allow you to “Assign restrictions and roles to specific pages, posts or categories.” Notice “categories” at the end of the that quote!

    Also, if you need help converting your MovableType data over to WordPress, we have a service that does just that at tp2wp.com.

    @will – per Multisite, this may be useful –

    https://halfelf.org/2011/dont-use-wordpress-multisite/

    Also, check out this plugin – https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/pods/

    Thread Starter Will Haynes

    (@willhaynes24)

    I appreciate your feedback.

    After taking your suggestions, and talking to some other system admins at news organizations, I’ve decided multisite is not the right approach.

    If anyone still has any suggestions for great plugins/additions (other than role scooper – which I’ll look into) for a newsroom workflow, I’d love to hear them. I’ve found some old resources for this, but I’d love to hear others.

    @wpyogi – I’ll think about custom post types, although I’m not sure we’ll necessarily need them. Would it be a better solution than just leaving the category “stub” as “./” to blank out that part of the URL, for our main categories?

    Thanks

    Will

    For managing the editorial workflow, you might want to try out the oasis workflow plugin. – https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/oasis-workflow/

    I had written this plugin with the intention to help manage the publishing workflow. Hope it helps.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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