TheColbyEcho.com runs on its own bespoke content management system called Sonar written by Jeff Carpenter and maintained by the Echo tech team.

We work hard to deliver the best online journalism experience we can. If you run into any problems on the site, have any ideas, or want to talk to us about college newspapers on the web, you can reach the team at echo-tech@colby.edu.

Sonar CMS

Sonar is written in PHP5 on the CodeIgniter web framework. In addition to functioning as an online publishing platform, the Echo uses Sonar to manage its production pipeline.

Why roll your own?

There are a lot of good CMS's out there. Why did we re-invent the wheel? There are a few reasons.

• We have big plans for our site - beyond that of a simple publishing platform.
• If you're serious about giving your users a great experience, the CMS you use will become custom anyway. An off-the-shelf CMS would have saved us time up-front, but eventually would impede development if we tried to go outside its scope.
• Two no-name guys living in California were also fed up with the status quo and decided to reinvent the wheel themselves. They changed the world because they were crazy enough to think they could.

As always, if you're interested in us or want to give us a piece of your mind, we're right here: echo-tech@colby.edu.