Newscoop feature list
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)
- Embedding multimedia or other external content
- 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:
- date field
- single-line text field, optionally with a maximum number of characters
- multiple-line text field with or without a WYSIWYG editor
- drop-down selection containing a list of topics
- 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
- Import of articles in XML format
- Feedback message system, with file attachments
Community building
- Comments
- Readers can make comments to articles
- Comments can becommented
- Comments can be recommended, highlighted from the editorial team
- There is a "featured comments" plugin which allows to publish user comments as a certain article type
- Flexible implementation: allow anyone to comment, or just readers logged in
- Comments can be moderated
- reCAPTCHA plugin for spam prevention
- User profiles and dashboard with social login
- Community ticker
Revenue generation
- Optionally control access to your content via a paywall plugin, with PayPal integration
- There is a Classified Ads plugin available
- 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: Scoopwriter
- Article Recommendation
- Classified Ads
- 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 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.
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