Question for the group. Do any Livewhale CMS schools use Livewhale to host their college or university’s student-run newspaper? I am well aware that the cleanest recommendation is: create a separate CMS site or microsite for the newspaper. We fully understand that student newspapers often prefer an independent CMS or another publishing platform because of editorial independence concerns. But ours is a VERY lean team, desiring support and challenged with no budget and a terrible, free archaic platform. They would very much welcome the help and support that using LW would offer if we address key issues up front. Their content in their group would need to be excluded from all college news feeds and stories not appear in our search results. I would need a distinct basic template, without our college’s header or footer, and a single simple news widget design. Has anyone done this?
We haven’t done this, and likely wouldn’t given our student group, but some thoughts:
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Closest we have is our magazine pages in its own group, but in that case, we want the stories integrated with other feeds. That said, assuming its based in a group, then it should be easily doable to set up something like you need from a design/theme perspective.
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I believe a LiveWhale instance can be separated into multiple subdomains, with potential for content separation or sharing as desired. I don’t know any other details beyond it being possible in some capacity. My guess is that it would be doable with sufficient technical work.
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A tangent to consider. Our student newspaper, with their separate/independent site, requested our IT folks to have a college subdomain (e.g. paper.college.edu). After the change was made, others raised some concerns about risk around what students write. Specifically, if a student wrote something libelous on “a college website”, being at a college subdomain or server hosted/managed by the college, is the college legally complicit and liable?
Hi Erin,
One pathway you might consider: There are tons of free (or inexpensive) site templates out there. Any of them could pretty easily form the basis for a LW-powered student newspaper site, just by using the code from those templates as the format for LW widgets, details pages, etc. (We did something similar several years ago when setting up a sample site for LiveWhale Storyteller.)
Excluding their content from elsewhere on the site is also likely doable at the group level, though I’d need to check with the team to make sure. Overall I guess my point is it’s not an enormous project to take on, whether in house or by having our team help.