The change in publishing platforms is a significant move and requires some preparation from your staff and coordination/planning with College Media Network staff. This article outlines the processes involved in this switch.
Changes for review:
Site Redesign
The CP5 system allows for much more design flexibility. Regardless of whether you would like to completely redesign your site or keep your site the same, site layout will look slightly different due to basic feature upgrades of the publishing system.
Aside from ad positions (of which there is a reduced number), there are no longer any restrictions as to where and how content can be rendered on the page. Feel free to try your hand at a mockup (a jpeg or pdf will suffice); we will do our best to match your vision.
Content Migration
As we plan a launch date for the change to CP4 to CP5, we will do iterative archive imports – meaning, we will migrate articles, media and users and update those migrations as we get closer to the specified launch date.
Due to the size of some article archives and (in some cases) variety of sources from which the content has been published over the years, we sometimes see anomalies of stories rendering incorrectly. We cannot spot check multiple articles from years of publishing (on top of the fact that our engineers often don't know what to be looking for) – we will need your staff to proof the migration and confirm archives have migrated successfully.
Training on New Software
This site serves as a primary point of training with its articles of documentation as well as video tutorials. However, our staff is available to train over a conference call via WebEx on both the publishing and advertising systems. Please call us to schedule a time to do these (between 9:30am and 6pm EST); our general support line is 866.733.9231.
Advertising
The number of advertising positions in the system has been reduced. Click here for an explanation. The advertising system is a major upgrade from CP4 and encourages newspapers to evolve with the way they monetize their site (CPM versus flat rate). The data from the CP4 system will always be accessible through the old login at administration.collegepublisher.com, but will not be imported to the new Atlas ad management system. The advertising section of this site walks through all the ins-and-outs of online advertising best practices as well as training.
Service Agreement
CP5 offers new features and functionalities which are otherwise not covered in the old service agreement. One important area where this impacts each partner newspaper is with regard to revenue sharing; there is a new revenue sharing program (learn more here). MTV Networks accounts payable is unable issue checks each semester to newspapers participating in revenue sharing unless your organization signs a MTV service agreement stipulating the revenue sharing terms. Don't be left out, request a new contract as soon as possible.
LAMP Account
Personal development servers, otherwise known as LAMP accounts or boxes, will remain active for the time being. CP5's platform replaces many of the functions (such as blog hosting). While individual accounts were issued to the LAMP server under 4.0, all accounts relied on the same unit to process information. Any publication could place a useful, yet resource intensive application on this server, in turn causing severe delays for the rest of the network.
To streamline these complications, new LAMP instances and usage will be closely monitored to ensure server stability and performance for the entire network. Uses must be documented with CMN support and are subject to restriction. We highly encourage advanced programmers to consider obtaining their own development servers to host content, scripts and applications. CMN staff will gladly assist in creating virtual server directs and subdomains (CNAMES) for these third-party servers. If you have any questions regarding this issue, please e-mail support@collegepublisher.com.
Static Pages
If your publication used the General Information fields in CP4's ‘Custom Pages' area, you'll need to recreate these pages in CP5. These pages displayed text input using the General Information link under the Presentation tab in 4.0. Again, all content and information in CP4's administration area will continue to be accessible. However, this change definitely offers the opportunity to present information in new ways – feel free to contact us about new strategies with these informational types of pages.
