Live Blog 3.0 first public release is here

In the past few years, live blogging has become a widely adopted practice in newsrooms worldwide. Not a single week passes without breaking news or otherwise important events occurring that require ongoing coverage from sources as diverse as reporters, social media, and agencies.

On any given news website it’s common to see newsrooms running three or four live blogs at the same time. See this example by The Guardian from a few weeks ago:

In order to respond to the demanding needs of news organisations, Sourcefabric has been developing an even more versatile and reliable upgrade of our own open source live blogging application - Live Blog. 

Live Blog 3.0 is not a regular update to the previous 2.0 version of Live Blog. It is a revamp of Live Blog and there are only good reasons for this to happen. 

The purpose of the Live Blog 3.0-alpha version that we are releasing today is to share our progress with users and allow them to test the tool and provide us with valuable feedback.

What’s cool about Live Blog 3.0

We built the new Live Blog 3.0 to be easy to use, integrate, extend and develop further. Here are some of the key features that make us proud.

NEW LIVE BLOG EDITOR

The new Live Blog Editor makes contributing to a blog as simple as possible.

EMBED POST

Based on feedback from our current users, we made it even easier and faster to embed social media content in your Live Blog. You won’t have to look for the specific media tab, it’s enough to paste the direct link/URL into the Live Blog Editor. This functionality is powered by embed.ly, which supports 300+ social media content providers.

DEFAULT THEME

Live Blog now also includes a new minimalistic 'Default Theme' to get you started. As a default, this theme renders your content easily and allows you to embed your live blogs on your web page. In addition to the default theme, we designed a new theme framework, so you can develop your own theme based on your graphic design.

Stay tuned!

From now on we will keep releasing frequent updates as we move from alpha to beta once we reach feature completion. Our roadmap is pretty simple, we are now adding user roles, themes management and content tagging. Content syndication is also on our radar. Our target is to announce Live Blog 3.0 stable release in Autumn 2015.

This alpha release is a sneak peek to how the new Live Blog 3.0 will look and what it can do for you. You can request a demo instance by sending us an email. 

To help you understand how this new version works, we have put together this very simple quick start manual and short screencast.

You can share your thoughts and feedback with us on GitHub or via email. We’d like to hear from you!