Speech: Punctuation And Quotes

Still having some serious problems on punctuation and capitalization around quotes.

When a quote ends a sentence, followed by attribution, then the end of the quote gets a comma -- even if the quote was the source's spoken word -- and the attribution which follows is lower-case.

So if I say this:

"You guys rock."

Then this is how it should read:

"You guys rock," Omar said.

And this is NOT how it should read:

"You guys rock." Said Omar.

Also, general journalistic practice is to simply say said, even repeatedly and without having to come up with a different word for "said." I know it looks weird, having graf after graf with he said and she said and whomever said, but in journalism we just use said over and over and over again.