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First Edition: A Zero-Build Publishing Platform for Student Newspapers

Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: First Edition is a free, open-source publishing platform for student newspapers, written in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no build step, no framework and no runtime dependencies. It replaced a paper that had lived as pages inside its school's enterprise website platform, where most students did not know it existed, and it was designed around one constraint that commercial and self-hosted alternatives ignore: a school paper's technical staff graduates every June, so the platform must be maintainable by a sixteen-year-old reading the page source, and must still run unchanged five years later. The system is a set of static pages over a client-side data layer. Fifteen stores with an identical create-read-update-delete contract merge shipped content with editor changes and emit DOM events that renderers listen for; the same seam is where a host platform attaches server-side persistence. An editor dashboard covers articles, sections, staff, sports brackets, videos, puzzles and scheduled publishing, and never authenticates anyone: identity arrives through a one-object contract (WL_CONTEXT) that a school's existing website platform injects, with Finalsite as the first target. Because link-preview crawlers do not execute JavaScript, every published story is also emitted as a static page by a GitHub Actions workflow, and an optional Cloudflare Worker provides shared editing that commits the published snapshot to the repository. A WordPress/SNO importer carries an existing archive across in one command. Quality is enforced by 1,093 automated checks in 25 jsdom suites that drive the real pages by clicking and typing rather than calling internals, and by a Lighthouse accessibility gate in continuous integration. Version 1.0.0 was released on 14 October 2026 under the MIT licence; release 1.0.1, the code this report measures, is archived at Zenodo (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23445562); a live demo runs on GitHub Pages at zero hosting cost, and the first deployment, The Woodley Leaves at Maret School in Washington, DC, is approved with Finalsite integration in progress. The report describes the design rationale, architecture, implementation, test strategy, measured performance and accessibility, a deployment case, the pedagogical consequences of a zero-dependency design for a student newsroom, and the system's limitations. This report describes release 1.0.1 of the software, archived at doi:10.5281/zenodo.23445562.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23455213
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222875738
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