Margaret River now has a full online news service [http://news.mronline.com.au] which includes local news, community and club news, opinion columns, movie timetables and all sort of things. This is a first for a WA town I think.

I’ve had the pleasure of developing and now hosting the news service for Kim Murray, proprietor of Margaret River Online, which is the most comprehensive tourist info/portal site for Margaret River.

We based the news service on an open source content management system with a bunch of extensions to suit the style of site we were trying to create.

Here are a couple of things we did to make the site work better:

  • The site provides an RSS feed of news stories, which is used on the home page of Margaret River Online to give a ‘latest news’ box.
  • Anybody registered on the site (free registration) can submit news which is moderated by an editor before being posted. Registration is made really easy, making it easy for the editor to get community members to write stories which are then edited into news categories and maybe onto the front page of the site.
  • There are a minimum of static pages on the site. A club, society or opinion column writer has a category, and a series of dated entries under that category. It is like a bunch of multi-author blogs mashed together.
  • We removed a lot of complexity from the handling of stories and comments to make the site easy to use.
  • We’ve got the site hooked up to Google News. The Google news folk are really nice to deal with, by the way.

I really like the result and it will be very interesting to see how it goes as content is added and the community gets involved.

Link