• Introduction
• Ready to cook?
• Newscoop sites to get you inspired
• About this book
• Who we are
• Resources
• Planning your publication
• Turning your idea into a publication
• Planning your workflow
• Subscriptions and revenue
• Structuring your content
• From design to templates
• The power of $gimme
• Best practices in designing your content
• Preparing designs for templates
• Organising template files
• Tips and tricks for the template novice
• Installing template packs
• Making your templates
• Publication
• Issues
• Sections
• Articles
• Article comments
• Sites in multiple languages
• Search templates
• Making a 404 page template
• Advanced templating
• Topics, switches, keywords to structure content
• Managing static pages
• List of popular articles (most read)
• List of latest comments
• Using maps
• Managing multiple authors and articles
• Subscriptions, registration and content access
• Browser detection and robots (search engines)
• Mobile device detection and templates
• Tag clouds using topics
• Dynamic page layouts
• Working with Images
• Pagination of lists and long articles
• Audio player for attached mp3 files
• RSS, sitemap, KML and XML
• Search engine optimisation (SEO)
• Newscoop and HTML5
• Troubleshooting templates
• Templates using jQuery, PHP and third party services
• Using jQuery and PHP in templates
• Pulldown menu with Superfish using jQuery
• Tabs with jQuery
• Ticker with jQuery
• Image galleries with jQuery
• Calendars with jQuery
• Using polls with AJAX
• Widgets for YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr
• Profile pictures: Gravatar, Facebook, Twitter
• Combining Newscoop and SoundCloud
• Working with Facebook
• Working with advertising
• Ways to create archives
• Template reference
• Language elements and conventions
• Basic syntax
• Template reference - Objects
• Introduction to Newscoop objects
• Article object and attachment, comment, location
• Author and author biography
• Browser
• Image
• Issue
• Language
• Publication
• Section
• Subscription
• Subtitle (subheads in long articles)
• Template
• Topic
• URL
• User
• Default objects (list of all available objects)
• Template reference - Controlling objects
• Set objects
• Unset objects
• Local - temporary variable environment
• Template reference - Lists
• List articles and article related content
• List article topics and subtopics
• List issues and sections
• List subtitles (pagination of long articles)
• List images
• List languages
• List search results
• Template reference - Forms
• Search form
• Login and registration form
• Subscription form
• Comment form
• Action check on form submission
• General form elements and functions
• Template reference - Maps and geolocation
• Map
• Displaying a map
• Location multimedia
• Geolocation search
• Template reference - Modifiers
• Date and e-mail formatting
• File size formatting
• Truncating UTF8 strings
• URL display and modifying
• Appendix
• Credits and license

[view all chapters]

Topic

The topic object is usually initialized inside a list of article topics or a list of subtopics. It can be initialized at the beginning of the template from the URL request, or by using the set_topic function in Newscoop. The topic object has the following properties:

• name: returns the topic name in the current language defined in the template environment
• value: returns the topic value in the following format: <topic_name_lang_code> = <topic_name>:<language_code>
• identifier: the topic identifier in the Newscoop database
• defined: true if the topic object had a valid value