Who, what, when, where and why

More reliable, modern and fun to use: Newscoop 4.4 has arrived

Newscoop 4.4 is here! This release includes 1,279 changed files with 6,964 additions and 21,545 deletions. We are providing more features with less code. We picked apart some major parts of outdated legacy code and turned it into something modern and beautiful. Thus, Newscoop becomes much easier to maintain and with its new features, much more fun to use!

This new version includes changes to the publication and topics management. Additionally, the management of featured article lists have been refactored and come decorated with tests, a modern UI and some small but helpful additional features.

Developers will love the inclusion of the additional API endpoints that will allow them to build independent news applications based on the journalistic data available via Rest API. On top of that, editors will be able to increase their communication flow inside the newsroom by making use of editorial comments.

Let´s take a look at a more detailed view at the biggest improvements:

Editorial comments

Producing an online publication and working on the respective articles requires a lot of communication and input from various persons alongside the editorial workflow. With version 4.4, Sourcefabric brings that communication directly to the article and allows it´s editors to create a dialogue on what matters most to them - the piece of content they are working on.

Featured Article lists

Featured Article lists are your powerful tool to flexibly organise all kind of article lists on your home or section pages by simply dragging and dropping news items into a list. To provide the editors with a better overview of their articles, the new and refreshed UI comes with flags to indicate the status and type of articles listed. Additionally, editors can now on limit their list to a certain number of articles. That guarantees better performance in both the back and front-end.

New topics management

Let´s be honest, the old topics management UI was not ready to handle large numbers of topics. With this new implementation we provide a much more robust and modern User Interface.  It is now easier than ever to select article topics within the article edit screen and manage a large number of topics in various languages.

Publication management

Yes, you already know that you can manage various publications with just one instance of Newscoop, but you could not manage specific setting for individual publications until now. You can now provide publication specific Meta Tags to optimise your publications for search engines.

"Remember me" feature

A new “remember me” feature will now keep users logged in for their convenience. This feature works both in the backend (see the checkbox remember me on the login page) and in the frontend for the login of community members. When users click the checkbox “remember me”, they are now able to stay logged in for a much longer time than the actual session lifetime of 4 hours.

Plugins' structure generator

The generate:plugin-bundle command helps developers generate new Newscoop plugin bundles.

For more detailed information, you can take a look at the log file with bigger commits.

Summary of the main new/refactored features:

• New publications management

• New article topics

• New playlists management

• Editorial comments (in article edit screen)

• "Remember me" feature

• Plugins' structure generator

• More REST API services/controllers/classes unit tests

We hope you enjoy this new release! You can download Newscoop 4.4 now and test it out for yourself. As always, we love feedback from our users, so don’t hesitate to get in touch.

If you are new to Newscoop, take a look at our getting started manual and FAQ’s for more information.

For all additional questions about Newscoop, visit our help center, manuals or our support forum for more information.