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Badger Herald mini-CMS
Following the launch of the new Badger Herald site in September 2004, we realized our normal system of office communication (ad hoc lists and MS Word files) was not going to cut it. A lot of information — story names, headlines, bylines, photo captions, etc — needed to be shared by writers, editors, designers and photographers throughout the night. And now that we had a full-time web staff (finally), there was another group to worry about.
Through October and November, I worked closely with Taylor Hughes to design and develop an internal content management system that we could use to share the necessary information around the office. Keep in mind, this isn’t a web publishing tool (we use MovableType for that), but merely a simple way to manage editorial content that would eventually end up in the print or online editions of the paper.
Nickel tour
The application’s main view shows all stories slated for tomorrow’s paper. Users can either expand a story to see the associated information, or click to edit the story. Stories can be viewed by section, by date, or both.
Stealing a trick right out of the Basecamp playbook, we added a simple “movement” interface that allows people to slide stories around in the list. This is important, as decisions about ordering news stories carry a lot of weight, and we need to get it right everywhere.
Adding and viewing authors is easy. Rather than allow authors to be deleted (or the other option, which is to just leave them in the system), users can “de-activate” authors. This precludes them from being assigned to any new stories, but they are still associated with any existing stories they wrote. Smart, huh?
Demo
I got a copy of the app running on my server, plugged into an old version of the stories database. IE5 users, beware (on Mac or Windows). This was designed to be used internally on our Macs, so it obviously looks best that way. It works like a beauty in Safari and Firefox, and IE6 isn’t too bad either.
Final thoughts
Screenshots of this app have been sitting on the ZEMU site for a while, but I wanted to share a working demo. The web is about interactivity. Great things on the web are about harnessing that interactivity to create a really valuable experience. Showing off screen shots might look pretty, but there’s nothing like a working product to really share what an app is all about.