Newscoop 3.5 RC2

Sourcefabric announced on 17 January 2011 the second release candidate (RC2) of Newscoop 3.5.

Newscoop takes Sourcefabric’s decade-long experience of making tools for news organisations (not to mention the many years before that of actually working in the industry), and builds an open content management system for professional journalists.

Test Newscoop 3.5 RC2 now (not recommended for live news environments...yet!):
http://newscoop.sourcefabric.org/download

Newscoop 3.5 is released officially on January 31st 2011. Our journalist-centred multi-author management and issue-based approach is no secret but Newscoop builds on this even further with some of the most powerful geolocation tools ever seen in an CMS, plus a powerful templating engine capable of producing anything from HTML 5 to mobile.

Key features of Newscoop 3.5:

• Geolocation tool. Map out your content, using point and click or GPS data. Data can be displayed using Google Maps, Mapquest Open or OpenStreetMap.
• Credit multiple authors and manage their bio, image and information in one central place.
• Content can be structured in news-friendly issues, sections and different article types.
• Templating. Produce anything from HTML5 to mobile, or use our new range of custom-built magazine and newspaper templates.
• Overhauled GUI with new drag and drop widget dashboard (add Google gadgets, RSS feeds, image archives and more) and Article Edit page.
• Page caching engine, speeds up your pages by between 8-50 times over uncached speed on production environments. Especially useful for VPS hosts where APC or memcached is not available.

Improvements include:

• Article lists can now be filtered, sorted, and provide a custom display of the columns.
• If the user's session times out for security reasons, the user can log in again and not lose their work.
• You can now restore your entire site through admin interface by uploading one of your backup files.
• Much easier install. You now have the ability to also choose the template set you want to use during install.
• Password restore option (at last!)
• Mass upload of files for attachments and photos.
• New topics user interface (tree display with Ajax) with ability to search topics.  Drag and drop topics to reorder them.
• The permission "User will be notified on several events"(which sends out emails when something happens in the admin interface) is disabled by default for all User types (a lot of you will really appreciate that one!)
• More useful information in notification emails
• Automatic calendar popup for date fields article type
• Template Engine improvements:
  • List Articles in topic including subtopics
  • Ability to list articles ordered by last_update article property
  • Ability to display the image archive on the frontend
  • Sorting order for {{list_article_images}}

Newscoop 3.5 is released officially on January 31st 2011. 

• More information
• Full changelog
• Download
• Manual
• Forums
• Demos
• Developer's wiki
• Bug Tracking
• Public source code hosting

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