Booksprinters write the Newscoop 3 cookbook.
Little known fact: it was Sourcefabric's first birthday on Saturday! Happy Birthday us! We didn't make too much of a song and dance about it as we've all been far too busy writing books, attending events and writing software! Suffice to say, we're all amazed at the progress over the last twelve months and would like to thank our board, supporters, friends and all those who have helped us. Every download, bug report and line of code helps us fulfill our mission and support quality independent journalism worldwide. Thanks everyone. Read on for the latest news!
Last week we locked six intrepid booksprinters away in das Schloss Neuhausen in Brandenburg, Germany for five days. The aim? To produce the Newscoop 3 Cookbook, the ultimate guide to Sourcefabric's open content management system for professional journalists.
They succeeded. At a phenomenal 297 pages, the book is a veritable tome of step-by-step recipes, developers tips, code snippets and working examples that allows you to build a powerful, professional site in no time. Decades of collective template experience went into the cookbook and we hope it will be perfect as either an introduction to Newscoop, or as a desktop reference for the seasoned user. Keep an eye on our site for links to the online and print versions very soon.
Dates for your diaries! Paul Baranowski will be presenting Airtime at the Linux Audio Conference in Maynooth, Ireland on May 7th and Adam Thomas will be holding an Airtime Workshop at Netaudio London at The Roundhouse on May 15th (sign up here).
Sourcefabric attended and presented at various prestigious conferences and meet-ups over the last fortnight too. Jakub wowed the crowds at Lisbon's SWITCH Conference (see an interview) and Adam presented at Salzburg's Civilmedia11 (hear the audio) and Berlin's legendary re:publica. As always, we were amazed and encouraged by the enthusiastic response from everyone who spoke to us. If you one of them, it was great to meet you.
The Airtime 1.8 packages are ready! Users who have installed Airtime 1.6.X or 1.7.X from the repository will get updates automatically. New users who want to use the packages rather than source-ball should follow instructions on our wiki. It's a little more work, but it means you'll be upgraded automatically in future.
Airtime 1.8 hit record numbers of downloads in its first week, with popularity in France and Indonesia catapulting them into the top five countries where downloads occured. Francophone interest has been so great in fact that a new forum was requested from us and we duly obliged. Airtime Français lives!
Set in Earth's future, Mihai's favourite book Ender's Game involves an international fleet of talented children trained against insectoid alien invaders. Now, we can't say that our Romanian team of Newscoop developers are working on anything quite that exciting, but they're a super talented bunch and Mihai is one of the most recent. Liking nothing more than the thought of Californian roadtrips and listening to the radio, Mihai has his sights set on travelling to China in the future. He says he's a perfectionist who loves having intuitive stuff and loves a challenge. He's going to fit in just fine.
Refactoring Newscoop has begun in earnest with the focus on Users/Permissions and Comments and Languages. Administrators will have a more secure, flexible and dynamic way to allow/deny privileges and to customise the comment system on the site (or plugin Facebook and Disqus). http://disqus.com/ Stay tuned for news on a Newscoop 3.6 release date in May; it's going to be huge.
Airtime 1.9 is already in motion, with exciting new features under wraps. The developer team won't let me say too much here, but the new functionality in the media library has to be seen to be believed.
Finally, a huge Sourcefabric hello to James Moon who is from British Columbia, Canada and has already remotely started great work on the Airtime code with the expanding dev team in Toronto.
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