It looks like some college newspapers are about to head in the same direction as many well-known ones, and in somewhat the same direction as the White House. CoPress is a new company that offers managed hosting and training for college newspapers interested in tranistioning from expensive proprietary content management systems to WordPress. Many newspapers, forced to slash costs in a punishing environment, are looking to open source and free content management systems, and quite a few of them are reporting significant cost savings. Why shouldn't the trend extend to college newspapers?

If your blogging platform of choice is WordPress, then you've no doubt noticed recent improvements to the way it catches spelling, style, and grammatical errors. That's thanks to acquisition of After the Deadline, a language checking software package designed for WordPress and TinyMCE.

The plugin's creator, Raphael Mudge, announced today that he has released the source code for After the Deadline (AtD) under the GNU General Public License. "We’re also announcing a jQuery API for After the Deadline. Now you can add an AtD check to a DIV or TEXTAREA with little effort," writes Mudge. This is the same API that powers the Intense Debate plugin I wrote about recently.

If you use WordPress then you know what a great blogging platform it is right out of the box. It does everything a blogger could want and more, but hundreds of industrious users have come up with plugins to make it even better. Here are just five of the over 6,800 different plugins the WordPress community has dreamed up. (Disclosure: Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.)

IntenseDebate - Add a ton of increased functionality to your comments with this handy plugin. Create an IntenseDebate account, install the plugin on your blog, then sync the two systems. You can moderate and reply to IntenseDebate comments right from the Admin panel, and make use of extra features like avatars, reputation points, and more. IntenseDebate also syncs all your trackback and pingback data for easy reference and linkjuice.