Testing, Templating and Translating

Pinch, punch, first of the month and we can hardly believe we’re here. January was frantic - two new products, a new website and the start of our Journalism Is Back campaign. February will continue at the same pace. Here’s the highlights...

• Newscoop 3.5 out now!
• Global community action
• Breaking the mould
• Developer spotlight

Newscoop 3.5 out now!

Newscoop 3.5 was released on Monday, a month and a half after the December RC release saw newspapers all over the world sit up and take notice of a CMS designed with journalists in mind. We’ve been overwhelmed by the interest in Newscoop since then and this, the first production-ready release, has a set of features we’re really proud of. We can’t wait to get your feedback on the multiple-author management, new interface and some of the most powerful geolocation tools ever seen in an CMS.

Global community action

January 17th saw launch parties in 11 cities worldwide from Minsk to Guatemala (you can check out the pictures on our Flickr and we follow up this spirit of international community with the rollout of our international sites in the very near future. Behind the scenes we have teams of translators and localizers to bring you up-to-the-minute Sourcefabric information, features and news in your language. First out of the traps will be the Spanish, Russian and Greek sites (and the best thing is that we did it all using Newscoop’s in-built multi-language tools)!

Breaking the mould

Many of our support requests involve people with overworked blogging platforms trying to get credit for serious journalism, but being let down by the way their site looks. Our new template theme is based on Woo Theme’s hugely successful The Journal. Ideal for web publishing, with clean typography and an elegant grid structure, this template highlights what matters most - articles and their images. Best of all it’s free. Check out our demo to see it in action. Think you can do better? Newscoop templates are built on Smarty, a template engine for PHP, meaning it’s incredibly easy to develop and deploy.

Sourcefabric at transmediale

Join Douglas Arellanes, Micz Flor and Adam Thomas for Sourcefabric’s contribution to one of Europe’s largest digital culture festivals. We’ll be continuing our Test Signals series with two panels (Radio Tactics and Radio Magic) and an Open Digital Radio workshop. All details on the transmediale site, but suffice to say some of the world’s leading broadcasting luminaries will be enlightening audiences as they discuss the future of open source radio, technology and software.

Developer spotlight

All eyes have been on our bug and feature tracker which has been running at full speed this month as tickets have been created, assigned and closed in order to get Newscoop 3.5 out there. New features requests are already building up for version 4.0 - get in there quick to post yours. The Airtime team have been maintaining radio silence while they work incredibly hard to overhaul Campcaster and test its awesome new GUI. Version RC1 comes out today for testing and downloading and the full version is out on February 14th.