Anybody using Saxotech/Publicus?

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Permalink Reply by Marcel Levy on January 29, 2008 at 12:19pm

We use it at RGJ.com -- nearly all the Gannett sites use the system as well. I've used it both from a template designer and an editor's perspective. What kind of questions do you have?

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Permalink Reply by Henry Howard on January 29, 2008 at 12:28pm

We use it for our online publishing. Pretty intuitive system, though I can't address the template designer viewpoint.

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Permalink Reply by Elaine Helm on January 29, 2008 at 12:37pm

Well, a number of things just don't work the way they're supposed to. Polling, for example. Do you ever use Saxo to create polls? This is one of many areas where we are considering a workaround.

I'm the link between the newsroom and the technical Web folks here, but I'm on my own frequently for development, so I've done quite a bit of template building and tinkering.

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Permalink Reply by Marcel Levy on January 29, 2008 at 12:39pm

We never used the Saxotech polls. We were using our own custom system, but recently we switched to Polldaddy at http://www.polldaddy.com/. It's free and perfect in nearly every way.

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Permalink Reply by Henry Howard on January 29, 2008 at 12:42pm

We use the polls, and they are finicky at best. What type of problems are you running into?

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Permalink Reply by Elaine Helm on January 29, 2008 at 12:48pm

Thanks for the tip, Marcel. I'll try that.

We can't get the Saxotech database to retain user information entered in the contest part of the polling module. We also cannot format poll results, which pretty much makes them useless. A big part of the reason people take polls is to see how others have voted. These features are supposed to work, according to Saxotech's documentation. We just can't seem to make it happen.

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Permalink Reply by Brea Jones on January 29, 2008 at 9:14pm

We use Saxotech for polls on the front page and section fronts of Recordnet.com, as do other newspapers in Ottaway. While I have no idea why you are struggling to format the poll results, I don't know if it is worth the hassle. I find the polls a challenge merely because of the limit of how many options you can give and the character limits.

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Permalink Reply by Fred on July 4, 2008 at 2:10am

Hello!
I have really big problem with saxotech, I can't add more than one photo at once. Adding photos one by one is really hard job, someone can help me how to add more than one photo at once?
Thanks!

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Permalink Reply by Bess Davis on July 7, 2008 at 9:46am

Depending on how many photos you want to add, it might be worth it to just throw together a gallery and put it high up on the page.
I try not to put more than three on with our stories because the scrolling annoys people.
At the Indy Star we use something called Auto Focus to create our photo galleries, and they get tons of clicks, even on stories.

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Permalink Reply by Frank on July 5, 2008 at 5:44am

I've used SAXOTECH, and sometimes you don't know how good you have it till its gone, as now we're using OpenSource....we get what we need....usually.....eventually....but with not a lot of documentation. I saw that SAXOTECH now has a user community similar to Open Source, but you actually have some SAXOTECH Support and Developers helping & participating, so cool. Maybe there's another place to get help. Polls can be tricky with any application depending on what you want to do with it, not many offer freedom of layouts, ads or sponsors, etc... the way creative people would like to use them, but the heavy lifting that SAXO does makes going out to find freeware for your polls not worth the hassle of working to hard to figure out a better way or work around.

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Permalink Reply by Elaine Helm on July 7, 2008 at 8:56am

For anybody who hasn't seen it yet, there's now a Saxotech users group at http://saxotech.ning.com. You also can tap into Saxotech's developer community at http://community.saxotech.com.

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Permalink Reply by John Hancock on August 5, 2008 at 11:50am

I am an independent community newspaper publisher in Australia. A couple of years ago we took a close look at how we were doing business and we set about building our own software to make life easier. We now run all our content through our website and export to print. Over the past 6 months we have started sharing this with other independent newpapsers and have signed up 20 other independent publishers. We only charge for hosting, so this is not entirely a shameless self plug, because the product Ezyzine is free. Would be grateful for any feedback or questions. Thanks, John

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