I have an update about our little problem of missing about 10 years of archives from our site. Since leaving College Publisher in December, we have been patiently, eagerly, relentlessly waiting for our archives and users databases. This past Saturday College Publisher provided the archive database to us. Yea... don't get excited yet.

Right now if you go the home page of bgviews.com (CP5) or the home page of bgviewsnetwork.com (MT) you will see a Flash-based widget from Issuu showing the latest issue. This is completely automated, which is something that CP5 could not do - College Publisher even suggested Issuu as the solution to the shortcommings of CP5. In CP4, it would auto thumnail, and automatically place the latest PDF in the sidebar for us, we just had to tell the tool which PDF to use. And now we are back to being just as much, if not more, automated.

Now I need to build out a PDF Archive section in our MT site, something else that CP4 did for us, and now we need to do ourselves. The PDF will be officially launching the PDF Archive in the fall, and likely have a soft launch sometime this summer.

Depending on your layout, you may have a structure which has objects inside a right column splitter, inside of a main column splitter, which is how the four column split on parts of our home page. Say you edit an object inside the Right Column Splitter every day. Instead of moving through that navigation daily, which is quite slow in CP5, do this:

At the root of your site tree go to Sub pages and Create new page. Make sure to check Hide in navigation. Note: only top level Pages can be hidden. Name it Clipboard or something easily identifiable. This Page is still going to be accessible on your site, but since nothing will link to it, this should not pose a problem to you.

Since when you use the Copy/Paste buttons in CP5, every time you Paste, you are actually creating an instance of the original object. Change it in one spot and it changes globally. Now you can place your objects inside a splitter inside a splitter, and still get to them easily using your new "Clipboard."

Unlike most every CMS I have come across, managing the RSS feed is a chore and takes a lot of time that it should not. In order for the breadcrumb trail to work, you need to create the articles under the sub menu Pages. In our case, that would be like Sports under Our Views.

However, to get all the Sports articles to also show up in the main RSS feed, the articles have to be "copied" into the Articles tab of the root of the tree, BG Views. Click the thumbnail to the right to see the tab with a big red arrow pointing to it.

Click the Edit button, this allows you to use the Copy/Paste buttons. From the left frame click the Search tab, then Advanced. Select "latest hour" (you will be doing this right after you finish putting the articles in) then select "Saved by me" and click Search. You can now copy all the section specific articles into the main RSS feed by Copy/Paste into the Articles tab.

Campus Blotter
The Campus Blotter has a special section page at the root of the tree in the left frame. This is because you cannot hide sub menu items (which is lame). Be sure and go to the Campus Blotter Page and "copy" the blotter if you added one that day.

Once done, the section specific RSS feeds work, and the main RSS feed works, making all of our readers who love RSS (like me) happy.

As if daily maintenance in prime time EST is not enough, last night between the hours of 11 PM and 3 AM the CP5 Admin site was only up for short burst here and there. Otherwise the site would time out, or I could login but only see the left frame, not the right frame where all the work is done.

For me, I was updating our templates, updating the Classifieds section, and generally adding more content to make the site look better. For Craig, he was trying to publish the daily stories. He finally left a little before 3 AM, which is of course a little before the Admin site came back online.

At about 1:30 AM I got a call on my cell from Chris Gillon, and a few txt messages after that. I ended up getting Classifieds online, and a quick note about publishing late, before I headed home from a long day in the newsroom.

So, I wrote about this the other day. I believe we have published in CP5 three times now, and each time we get a broken footer that we need to email Lara to fix. When you publish an article in CP5, and then re-edit it, it likes to revert to draft state, we now know this.

But even keeping an eagle eye on the Draft check box did not stop it from happening again today when Craig put the day's articles online.

Three papers, three times messed up footer.  This is not going to last, it is getting very frustrating.  Why on Earth CP5 likes to set an already published article to draft is beyond me. I mean god forbid we edit an article after we publish it.

The problem lies, as I am told, when a once published article is set to draft, but still "live" on the site, meaning in a teaser, an article list, or category list, etc.  This system has many really odd ways of handling things, and handling drafts is one of them.

Allow me to explain how Movable Type works. If you change the status of an article to Draft in Movable Type, the index(s) are rebuilt and the article no longer shows "live" on the site. In fact it is no longer accessible if you type in the explicit URL.

Yet another annoying "feature" of CP5. Lesson: beware of draft status after you publish an article.

CP5, or Polopoly, has a lot of quarks. Hell, Movable Type has a lot of quarks. I will be using this post to document them as best as I can. This is more for my staff at The BG News, but may be useful for anyone else who is working with CP5.

There are a lot of things that I cannot do in CP5, some are much more annoying than others. I plan on updating this post with these things, as both a reminder and a constant reminder of what needs improved for College Publisher to truly have a solid CMS. In many respects, CP5 is a major step back from CP4.

I had really wanted to start off writing about mtvU with an informational post about College Publisher, and CP5.

That is not to say that this is not informational: If you edit an article multiple times, it will revert to Draft, and if that draft is referenced in a Teaser, it will break your layout, badly. Take a look at this FUBAR footer.