Newscoop 4.4 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.

Editorial features

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)
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
Group articles into sections
Group sections into an issue
Release an issue all at once
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
- show the article on the section page
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
- Topics can be translated
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:
- Reorder how the fields are displayed in the administration interface
- Hide fields that are no longer in use
- Translate the field names
- Change the data type for a field
Media Archive
- View/search all of the images in the system
- Edit image metadata
- Scale images any way you want on the fly with Renditions. Scaled versions are cached
File Attachments
- Attach files to articles
- Files can have descriptions
- You can specify whether the file should be displayed in the browser or pop up a download window
Comments
- Readers can make comments to articles
- Comments can be linked to a forum
- Flexible implementation: allow anyone to comment, or just readers logged in
- Comments can be moderated
- reCAPTCHA plugin for spam prevention
Import of articles in XML format
Feedback message system, with file attachments

Revenue generation

Optionally control access to your content via a paywall plugin, with PayPal integration
Geolocation and mapping features, enabling location-based services. Points of interest from multiple articles can be displayed on a single map. Locations can be linked to external URLs, images or video clips

Flexible plugin system

Newscoop plugins available from https://github.com/newscoop include:

Advertising
Airtime broadcast API
Analytics (with Piwik)
Article Calendars
Article Edit Screen
Article Recommendation
Comment Lists
External Login with single sign-on
Facebook
GitHub last commits
Google Events
Ingest for RSS and NewsML feeds
Instagram image ingest
Meteoblue weather API
Newsletters
Omniticker
Send Feedback
Solr Search
YouTube

and more. New plugins can be created to meet the specific needs of your publications.

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):

Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Belarusian
Chinese
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English (Great Britain)
French
Georgian
German
Greek
Hungarian
Italian
Polish
Portuguese (Brazilian)
Romanian
Russian
Serbian (Cyrillic)
Serbian (Latin)
Spanish
Swedish
Ukranian

Further translations are being added by the Newscoop community at https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/newscoop

We actively encourage Newscoop users to send us their language localizations. This makes Newscoop more useful for people around the world. Even if a similar language localization exists, it may not address your particular needs or regional differences. For example, there may be differences in Spanish between the language used in Spain and that used in Guatemala. In that case, you can localize Newscoop to your needs and share the localization with other users that speak your language or dialect.

For more information on how to contribute a localization to Newscoop, please email contact@sourcefabric.org

Site Design

Newscoop has its own template language 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

Dashboard with custom widgets for frequently used information
Import an entire site from WordPress, or any articles in the NewsML format
Fine-grained access control, you can create different user types such as:
- journalists
- editors
- photographers
- photo editors
- subscription managers
- site administrators
Multiple author support with contact information, biographies and article tracking
Accurate article-read statistics gathered through Javascript. This prevents inaccurate read counts caused by caching of web pages
All administration actions are logged
Security
- Login page secured against automated scripting attacks with reCAPTCHA
- Login password is encrypted when sent to the server
- Works with SSL on both the front-end and back-end
Backup
- Backup and restore directly in the administration interface
- 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
Automated Feedback and Bug Reporting
- If something goes wrong in the administration interface, a special page 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

Services

Sourcefabric services help make your Newscoop site even better. From web design to hosting, technical support to feature development, Sourcefabric's global team of experts takes care of things so you can concentrate on making great content.

Paid per-incident support is available from Sourcefabric (https://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 (https://forum.sourcefabric.org)