Welcome to the Daily Trojan Beta site!  We’re hard at work creating the next generation Daily Trojan website.  We’re glad you could join us.  Below, you’ll find an ongoing list of the new features and improvements we’ve made, or are soon to make, on this, our test website.

Please let us know your thoughts and ideas!

New Features

  • Featured Stories.
  • Tags.
  • Categories. Sub-categories exist under every section, so if you want to see just the football stories, or just Roundup, now you can.
  • New Design. More photos, more stories visible.  More styling and layout changes are on the way, too.
  • Polls. Simpler, better. See the bottom of the front page. (more styling still to come)
  • Archives. We’re working on adding things from before May, but the implementation is in place now.  See the bottom of the front page for now. Now includes a calendar display. (more to come on this)
  • Search. Smoother implementation — available on the top left or on the bottom of the front page. Now with smoother buttons and fields! (improved 5/28)
  • Fancy Zoom: Click any photo (in an article) to have it automagically zoom up to full size.
  • Nice punctuation. Curly quotes, proper apostrophes, em dashes and more.  Automatically.
  • Email Article: You can now email an article to a friend!  Try it — it’s very nice.  (styling and button response improved 5/28)
  • Most Emailed Articles. In the top left. (added 5/26)
  • Email headlines subscription — just temporary for now, through Feedburner, but you’re welcome to test it
  • Rate Articles: You can now rate articles from one to five stars, You can now recommend an article, and the highest-rated most-recommended articles will appear on the top left column (changed to recommendations 6/24)
  • RSS Feeds: For the whole paper and for every individual section.  See the top right corner of the page or the bottom of the front page.
  • Tag Cloud: See and explore the most-used tags on the site.  Now on the bottom of the front page, the tabber on the top of the front page, and the bottom of every story (improved 5/27 — more coming)
  • Flickr integration. Samples from the Daily Trojan flickr pool are shown. (more improvements to come on this)
  • Comments. Spam filtering, avatar support. (more improvements to come on this)
  • Recent Comments List.
  • Recently Added List.
  • Site Map. Not very interesting, but provides for better SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
  • Image Gallery. Available from the nav bar on top of any page. (improved 5/27)
  • Related Posts: The system automatically analyzes the titles, content, categories, and tags to come up with related articles at the bottom of each story.  Don’t see the listing?  Nothing is related enough yet. (added 5/28)
  • Rotating featured stories on the top center of front page. (added 8/14; modified 8/18)
  • Favicon: The DT now has a favicon (a little icon that shows up in the browser’s URL bar, bookmarks, etc.) (added 8/18)
  • Twitter updates: The latest twitter posts on various feeds can now be shown on the front page, sidebars, etc. (added 8/17)

Coming Soon

  • Bylines on each story –– sorry!  They’ll be implemented soon
  • Exerpts from stories in the listings on front page, “more news” sections — right now it’s producing a lot of caption mess.  Will be fixed soon.
  • Better category layout on bottom of front page.
  • Better text styling (fixing line spacing, bullet layout)
  • Advertising slots
  • Static Information pages
  • Social media links (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
  • Full headline emails
  • Breaking news alerts
  • Breaking news banners
  • Podcast listing
  • Blogs

Later this year

  • Pre-2009 Archives access