New Miami Hurricane site begins public beta Aug. 1

After months of discussing the new Miami Hurricane site on this blog and Twitter, from our consideration of Drupal to our ultimate selection of WordPress, the public beta version will launch this Friday, Aug. 1.

It’s a pretty sweet site and it’s even better than we expected. I’m tempted to drop the link now, but I will show restraint.

Hurricane webmaster Brian Schlansky has been toiling on the technical side since installing on our old file server Ubuntu in mid-April and WordPress in late April. He’s been manipulating PHP, editing CSS, adding/tweaking plug-ins and doing what ever need to be to prepare us for the beta launch.

We started with this theme and have come quite a long way.

One of biggest hurdles, which Brian cleared with surprising ease, was transferring the Hurricane’s College Publisher archives to the MySQL database for WordPress.

He and I have been in touch almost daily, corresponding for countless hours via instant message and Skype. Incoming editor in chief and longtime blogmaster Matt Bunch has contributed throughout the process, as has returning business manager Nick Maslow.

All four of us spoke on Skype Monday night to make sure we’re ready for Friday’s beta launch.

I will write another post when we launch the beta, giving a general overview. Everything in the site is pretty straightforward, which was part of one of our big goals: ease of use.

Stay tuned…

3 thoughts on “New Miami Hurricane site begins public beta Aug. 1”

  1. Congratulations on the new site! I’ve been following the discussion about upgrading the Miami Hurricane.

    I’m glad I could get a better perspective on revamping my previous college’s newspaper site, which needs tons of work.

    Definitely will be checking that out on Friday!

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