@Marshall: Yeah, that’s essentially what we do. In CP5, every article is a draft until we’re ready to publish it (and they have a “publish all drafts” button). Unfortunately, some CP5 elements rely on having a published article for display: you can’t lay them out with a draft and then publish the draft for the public to see.

I would solve it by having a way to search by date, and bulk publish the stories. You’d need a workflow state like “Ready for Publication”, then search for all “Ready for Publication” stories from the last week and set them all to “Published”. You could even automate that in the UI somehow (saved searches?).

@Neil: Yes, there are provisions for publishing all articles/media in an issue at once. That will also be a post at some point in the future, although the details will change with my new workflow proposal (also coming soon).

One question/request that’s slightly related to this topic: for newspapers that still publish on an issue cycle, will the software allow for a workflow where an entire issue is pushed out at once?
For instance, at the Herald, editors typically put article “skeletons” online first (in a non-public way) and then fill those skeletons in, making them public once they’re done. We recently moved to CP5, which has meant adding another step to that process; the editors now have to lay out the articles in the proper sections after publishing them. It would be really great if Courant allowed editors to lay out pages before the articles are public and then publish all of the articles at once, updating all of the pages at the same time.

The way we’ve decided to fix that is to drop editions entirely. The CMS will let editors specify a publication date instead of an edition, and then the templates will display all stories within a certain time period (e.g. from the last time we published until now). By default, the UI will suggest a pub date of next Monday, since we print on Mondays.

Similarly, I don’t think you really need issues in Courant. You just need an easy way for editors to choose a publication date that aligns with the issue publication date.

In terms of being able to design the homepage graphically, the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen was SquareSpace. You could check out http://manual.squarespace.com/videos/ I especially find their structure editing mode pretty attractive.

I think the main ideas could go like this;

* In order to allow for some consistency at least, you should definitely use a grid system. Modules could span across certain number of rows and columns. Some modules could be shrunk and expanded. FB used to allow that kind of behavior and it’s not especially hard to pull off with some CSS.
* The parts of homepage should be modular. There could be modules that allows you to pull in links to articles with snippets and you could scope it with tags. I think your get tag makes this kind of behavior pretty easy.
* You should be able to drag and drop modules around.

These comments do not really take into consideration of the technical aspects of how my ideas might be implemented. I kind of assume unlimited amount of manpower and time at hand. If I were to pick one thing to focus on; I’d go with a grid system. That just makes other kinds of things relatively easy to implement.