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Newscoop 3 for Journalists and Editors

Feature list

This list of features is provided as a guide to help you decide if Newscoop is the right content management system for your publication.

Multi-lingual content

All of the content that you create in Newscoop can be translated:

  • Articles
  • Sections
  • Issues
  • Publications
  • Topics (content categorization)
  • File attachment descriptions

The Newscoop administration interface has been translated into the following languages (in alphabetical order):

  1. Arabic
  2. Belarusian
  3. Chinese (Simplified)
  4. Chinese (Traditional)
  5. Croatian
  6. Czech
  7. Dutch
  8. English
  9. French
  10. Georgian
  11. German
  12. Korean
  13. Polish
  14. Portuguese
  15. Romanian
  16. Russian
  17. Serbian (Cyrillic)
  18. Serbo-Croatian (Latin)
  19. Spanish
  20. Swedish

Further translations can be added using a tool built into Newscoop called the "Localizer".

Revenue generation

  1. Control access to your content via:
    • User's IP Address (for corporate accounts)
    • Login/password (for individual users)
  2. Control the content your subscribers have access to:
    • The entire issue
    • Specific sections in each issue
    • Specific sections in a particular language
  3. Support for a trial subscription period, for instant access while payment is made
  4. Set your own pay periods (the time between each payment made by a subscriber)
  5. Geolocation and mapping features, enabling location-based services

Editorial features

  1. Online WYSIWYG editor for article editing:
    • Typical style formatting: bold, italic, etc.
    • Special support for linking to existing (internal) articles
    • Ability to split articles into multiple pages
    • Insert images into your articles
    • Copy & Paste clean text from Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org (while preserving bold and italics)
    • Insert subtitles, which can be used for breaking up the article (pagination)
  2. Built with multiple simultaneous users in mind
    • While a journalist is editing an article, it is "locked". A warning will be displayed if anyone else tries to edit the article at the same time. This prevents one journalist from deleting the work of another
  3. Group articles into sections
  4. Group sections into an issue
  5. Release an issue all at once
  6. Allow subscribers to access only certain issues
  7. Scheduled Publishing: automatically publish articles or issues at some time in the future. For articles, you can schedule the following actions:
    • publish
    • unpublish
    • show the article on the front page
    • remove the article from front page
    • show the article on the section page
    • remove the article from the section page
  8. Topics: Categorize your content
    • Define however many topics you like
    • Associate any number of topics to an article
    • Topic can have subtopics, subtopics can have sub-subtopics, etc.
    • Topics can be translated
  9. Dynamic, Flexible Article Types
    • "Article Types" allow you to define your own article format - you aren't limited to just "Introduction" and "Body" fields, for instance. An Article Type consists of a series of data fields
    • You can define any number and combination of the following field types:
      • date field
      • single-line text field with a maximum number of characters
      • multiple-line text field with WYSIWYG editor
      • drop-down selection containing a list of topics
    • Reorder how the fields are displayed in the admin interface
    • Hide fields that are no longer in use
    • Translate the field names
    • Change the data type for a field
  10. Image Manager
    • View/search all of the images in the system
    • Edit image metadata
    • Scale images any way you want on the fly. Scaled versions are cached
  11. File Attachments
    • Attach files to articles
    • Files can have descriptions
    • You can specify whether the file should be displayed in the browser or popup a download window
  12. Comments
    • Readers can make comments to articles
    • Comments can be linked to a forum
    • Flexible implementation: allow anyone to comment, just subscribers, logged in
    • Comments can be moderated
    • Built-in CAPTCHA for spam prevention
  13. Works with SSL on both the front-end and back-end

Site Design

Newscoop has its own template language specifically made for online newspapers and magazines. It allows you to customize your site however you want.

  • You have access to the following data objects:
    • publications
    • issues
    • sections
    • articles
    • topics
    • current user
    • current language (e.g. automatically show the user an article in their language)
  • Control statements such as IF and LIST
  • Include other templates
  • Built on the SMARTY templating engine which allows easy customization and inclusion of third party modules

Administration

  1. Fine-grained access control, you can create different user types such as:
    • journalists
    • editors
    • photographers
    • photo editors
    • subscriber managers
    • site administrators
  2. Multiple author support with contact information, biographies and article tracking
  3. Accurate article-read statistics gathered through Javascript. This prevents inaccurate read counts caused by caching of web pages.
  4. All administration actions are logged
  5. Security
    • Login page secured against automated scripting attacks with a CAPTCHA
    • Login password is encrypted when sent to the server
  6. Backup
    • Command-line "backup" and "restore" scripts make it easy to backup your entire site and restore it with one command
    • You can also easily transfer your site from one server to another using these scripts
  7. Automated Feedback and Bug Reporting
    • If something goes wrong in the administration interface, a special screen will appear which allows you to submit the problem back to the Newscoop team
    • You can also submit feedback directly in the administration interface, such as suggestions or feature requests

Developers

  • Completely open-source LAMP development stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP)
  • Newscoop and all the libraries it uses are fully compatible with GPLv3
  • Easy to use object-oriented API to develop plugins or alternative interfaces
  • Easy-to-read code
  • Open development process - all planning, specs, and reviews are done in the open. Developing Newscoop is a community process

Full commercial support

  • Paid per-incident support is available from Sourcefabric (http://www.sourcefabric.org). Guaranteed support contracts ensure a 24-hour response time
  • If you need additional features in Newscoop, they can be ordered from Sourcefabric at a very reasonable cost and delivered in a timely manner
  • Sourcefabric has a team of full-time developers working to make Newscoop easier to use, with the features you want
  • Community support is available via mailing lists and forums (http://forum.sourcefabric.org)
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