Making a more accessible, community-friendly Newscoop in 2014
This is going to be a big year for Sourcefabric's Newscoop CMS. We had an amazing 2013, with loads of developer commits from an exceptional team. So thanks to everyone for their help! And in the year ahead we are planning to focus on making our code and community more friendly for developers. We made a big start to this already by moving our source code to Github. We now have 18 repositories. This new home houses our plugins, scripts for newscoop and themes.
A look inside the code
Last year's development brought quite a few changes to our codebase. we changed 7,379 files with 184,799 additions and 699,859 deletions. Our Newscoop development team has been removing as much legacy code as possible and replacing it with modern code to introduce new functionality and to maintain external plugins.
Most importantly we have moved to Symfony (components). We've based our plugin system on Symfony bundles and are also using some external bundles. This was a big switch but worthwhile as Symfony is very stable and bug free. It also reduces the amount of code we have to maintain leaving us with more time to focus on new functions rather than maintenance of libraries. Please check our composer.json file for details.
Easy install
We decided to abandon the legacy installer and replace it with a new one. It's still under development but is now almost entirely functional. We intend to include it in the final product shortly and you can expect that ease of use in 2014. The exciting thing about this is that it will be possible to install Newscoop directly from the command line.
Alongside the general install of Newscoop we've been working to make our plugins easier to install. In the next major release you can expect to be able to quickly publish your plugin on packagist.org (or provide a zip file for private plugins) and install it from the admin panel.
New Upgrades
Another thing you can expect to see us working on in the year ahead is our current upgrade system. It is not as polished as we'd like, but we are working on streamlining it. Our biggest problem is that, during the upgrade process right now you have to download the entire newscoop package, replace all the files and even manually remove some of the unneeded ones. So we've decided to make this simpler and we are working on building a new system that is based on using small updated zip files containing conventions, required changes, and upgrade tasks, making it faster and more efficient to upgrade.
You can see our work on the new upgrade system here.
New API
In the latest major release 4.2, we introduced a basic read rest API. In the upcoming release, 4.3 promises lots more goodies! We are planning to extend the list of read resources. And by far the coolest change we are planning to implement is a write API! We will open the documents for API 1.1 soon. But have no fear, the old API 1.0 will be still available. Finally, we are planning to implement a new article edit screen so this will vastly improve and change the look and experience of publishing in Newscoop. Details will be coming soon!