One of the biggest challenges in moving away from College Publisher has been the 10 years of archives we have had online. As I am sure you are aware, those were abruptly taken down in January.

Simply put, there was no other way to switch from their servers to ours.

We are working tirelessly to get the archive back online, and today I would like to share (a new) update on that. I sent out an update on our Facebook Fan Page on Feb. 8, and I wish I could say we have made progress since then.

Hit the jump to hear the (somewhat condensed) updated info.

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.

The launching of a web site is a stressful one, but the re-launching of one can be enough to kill you. Lucky for me things went smoothly in the wee hours of January 12 (and I am not typing this from the grave).

I would like to say the transition away from College Publisher has been a smooth one, but it in fact has not. Just today the domain name was finally transferred into our account, and it is still not resolving all over the Internets yet. And we do not have our database of past archives, last I talked to CP it looked like I would have them by Friday.

So if you are just tuning in, the entire BG Views Network of sites is running under Movable Type, including The BG News, which was previously partnered with College Publisher. We are by far not the first school to leave College Publisher in recent months, and no doubt won't be the last.

But this post is not about College Publisher, it is about Movable Type, and how we are using it to produce a daily newspaper online.

Since I have had a number of people ask me about how we built BG Views, from BGSU, other colleges, Facebook and even some people on Twitter, I have finally sat down to write about it. For the most part, you can gather how BG Views has been built by reading the posts already here on this blog.

Sections of these posts will be overview and cursory, while others will be technical in nature. You have been warned! This will span many parts, this is more or less the introduction.

The project started a few years ago when Bob Bortel and I wanted to re-launch our BG News web site to be a community site, not just an online version of our newspaper. Timing for this was right, too, as College Publisher was getting ready to release CP5, with many more community driven features.

Fast forward to the time we went to put the wheel to the pavement, and College Publisher did not have those features fleshed out yet - and still don't. This blindsided us, as mtvU and College Publisher were not going to be able to deliver features they had promised us months earlier, and we had a looming launch with a feature set in place as a goal.

Luckily, I had for months toyed with the idea of handling much of the site ourselves, not through our partner. In the end, that is what had to happen. So, as the site runs today, the "news" portion of the site, Our Views, is run through College Publisher, the rest running on our own servers that we maintain.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but sadly I have been sounding like a scratched 45 for over a year now while working with the transition from CP4 to CP5. So, as it stands, here is another part of the site that is being handled in Movable Type now.

College Publisher's CP5 platform still has yet to produce a mobile template for us to use, so that was a major reason I brought our Classifieds section over to our MT site. Another reason was the fact that in the CP5 system, there was no way to actually search the classifieds. Also, CP5 no longer gives us the automated functionality for classifieds that CP4 once did.  Talk about a step backwards.

There is more to come this summer concerning our classifieds section, including a free Community Classifieds section. But for now, you can see the Today's Listings page, and the Mobile counterpart. Oh, and both are searchable.

I have also added a Classifieds link on the main Mobile site at m.bgviews.com.

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.

We have received some good site feedback so far, all things we need to address. Some are things we can control, some our out of our hands because of the tool we use to publish the site:

Site Search
Our full archive should be imported so you should be able to use the site search to find it. However, as of this writing, there are no byline names imported at all. We are working with our partner to fix this oversight. Our own writers are having problems finding their own articles, most notably from this current semester and last, so we are still working on that.

Issue Dates
Issue dates is something that our current CMS does not have. It also does not handle sections and page indexes as the old site did. We are still coming to terms with the new CMS, and finding that we need to make things such as issue indexes ourselves. This is currently at the top of our "to-do" list.

Favicon
Although it may seem trivial to some, it is an important part of a web site's brand. Some have noticed that we no longer have a favicon on bgviews.com, but do if you go to our blogs site. This is because our partner does not allow us to customize the favicon for the site. However we are talking with them about a number of things this week, including the favicon.

Thanks for those who have sent in feedback, we really do apreciate it. Please keep it coming.

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.