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Newscoop 4.1 Cookbook

Structuring your content

Newscoop's built-in logic for organizing content follows a logical and hierarchical structure derived from print publications. The following structure is built in by default:

  • Publication, which consists of chronologically ordered issues
  • Issue, which consists of sections
  • Sections, which store articles
  • Articles, which can be of different Types
  • Article Types, which you can build specifically for your publication

You can overrule this structure and change this hierarchy to fit your publication. For example, you could use issues as containers for storing the site's substructure (without chronological importance, for example). Or you could have only one issue with lots of sections. Some situations are best handled with multiple publications, while others might work best with an emphasis on Topics, not Sections.

How you organize your content usually depends on:

  • The nature of the content being published
  • The workflow inside your team
  • The amount of content to be published
  • The rate new content is added

Example: Magazine

Let's imagine the website of an existing weekly print magazine. In this Cookbook, we often use the theme "The New Custodian" which reflects magazine structure. It covers topics like politics, business, science and technology, health, entertainment and sports. In such a situation, it's logical to use the built-in publication > issue > section > article structure in a straightforward way.

In Newscoop, you don't need to create a new issue from scratch every time - just select 'Add new issue' and then 'Use the structure of the previous issue' - you'll get an empty copy of the previous issue with all of its sections, settings and assigned templates.

"The New Custodian" can be seen at http://newscoop-demo.sourcefabric.org/

Example: Radio station site

Newscoop can be used to power a radio station website, where content is bilingual, and where the 'publication' only has one issue. Each radio show has a section, and individual articles can be added into this section when a new episode of the show has been broadcast. Breaking news items are presented on the front page.

Newscoop's SoundCloud plugin can be used to upload individual audio clips and attach them to news articles. Recordings of entire shows can be uploaded and displayed on show articles. In addition, Sourcefabric's Airtime broadcast software can be used to automatically record live shows and upload them to SoundCloud.

An example of this approach can be seen at West Africa Democracy Radio's site at http://www.wadr.org.

Example: Blog

Newscoop can be used as a blogging platform, which is especially suitable for group blogs or blogs with multiple authors and sections. For this purpose you might choose a structure where issues are months, or you could have yearly issues. The website front-end doesn't have to reflect the issue structure, as Newscoop can generate the listing of articles regardless of where they are in the structure; for example, ordering them by publication date.

Inside the blog, you can structure your content with Newscoop Topics. Topics are flexible and could either be used like tags, or in a hierarchical structure like categories or a taxonomy. Find out more about topics later in this manual.

An example of how Newscoop can be used as a high-end multi-lingual blogging platform can be seen in "The Journalist" template from Sourcefabric. The online demo is at http://journalist.templates.sourcefabric.org

Any other structure logic can be developed and used with Newscoop. It's really a matter of good planning, and analysis of the factors discussed at the beginning of this chapter.

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