BU Prepress

A plugin for handling all prepublishing functionality for BU Editorial properties.

BU Prepress is an editorial focused plugin for WordPress that adds a set of tools, templates, designs, blocks, and components for consistent creation and publishing of editorial stories, special content, and magazines or similar publications for BU websites. It was designed to meet the editorial needs of Boston University’s publications: BU Today, Bostonia, and The Brink. However it was designed to be available as a university wide plugin that would extend the core functionality offered to all publications at BU.

Key features identified in the initial project development were:

  1. Robust editing tools using the new Gutenberg Editor for WordPress
  2. Improved sharing and cross promotion of stories between publications
  3. A modern, mobile-first, responsive code base that will allow editorial stories to be accessible (and look great) on any size device
  4. Standardize new Article “formats” with new tools to help build: photo essays, listicle stories, video stories, Q&A stories, etc.

Publications:

  • Supports Multiple Publications in 1 site. (BU Today, Bostonia, The Brink all exist in a single WordPress site and can share content)
  • Allows the sharing and cross promotion of content between multiple publications in the same site. This is modeled on large news companies that have a suite of publications.
  • Publications can be published on any schedule desired: monthly, quarterly, yearly, daily, etc.
  • Publications can enable/disable support for specific content types listed below.

Content Types:

Adds support for the following content types:

Articles:

The core post type added by BU Prepress for the creation of editorial stories. Flexible with a variety of designs possible through the use of the new Gutenberg Block Editor, 20+ custom Gutenberg Blocks and Article Templates with a new Editor template system.

Closeups:

A structured “photo of the day” or “video of the day” type of post. Flexibility with image or video size and aspect ratio.

Collections:

A collection post is a group of Article posts connected under a specific topic or idea. This goes beyond taxonomies to provide custom landing pages, and navigation options within Articles that are part of the same collection. BU Today uses this post type to power it’s “Series” section (http://bu.edu/today/series). Articles under a published Series such as Decked Out Dorms: http://www.bu.edu/today/series/decked-out-dorms/ are grouped together with a custom landing page. Further each article can choose to have Collection navigation blocks added to the start and/or end of the article so readers can easily find other stories in that Collection.

Editions:

This powerful post type is used for selecting stories to promote, feature, or highlight in different layouts on the homepage of the Publication. The layout is entirely flexible and stories can be promoted based on the editorial significance instead of fitting stories into a fixed publication homepage layout. Editions can be scheduled for publication daily such as BU Today or multiple times during the year tied to a print publication mailing such as Bostonia. However, the Edition post type goes farther and supports the ability for a publication to both publish scheduled “Issues” such as the Bostonia Fall 2020 issue on the web in connection with the print version mailing, but still be able to publish daily “editions” in order to publish fresh content to the homepage in between the scheduled “Issues” four times a year. This keeps the homepage of the publication from becoming stale in between issues.

Social & SEO Tools:

BU Prepress provides a modern code base friendly to SEO optimization. In addition custom social sharing tools are included to allow the easy sharing of Articles and other posts on social networking sites.

Gutenberg Blocks:

The new Gutenberg editor allows for a new way of edition content in WordPress. BU Prepress requires Gutenberg and makes extensive use of it through 50+ custom designed Editorial Gutenberg blocks.