NowPublic.com rolls out version 3
NowPublic.com, a Drupal powered citizen journalism site, rolled out version 3 this week. As with V1 and 2 we are building all the functionality of the newsroom into tools that are free for anyone to use. The idea being that through collaboration, writers/bloggers, photographers and editors can all make contributions to the news. The result is news built by the people, more closely representing our interests. Anyone can post what they’re reading (like digg or newsvine), file written stories (like a blogging tool) or upload photos (i.e. flickr), audio and videos (as with youtube).
A lot has happened in the last year since we launched the first version of NowPublic.com. The first thing your likely to notice is the new look and feel. We also updated our thumbprint technology which allows anyone to use the footage (audio, video, photos) that has been uploaded to NP on their own site or blog. We introduced a new tool called the Public View (a bookmarklet, soon to be a browser plug-in) so members can easily share the news they read, and we improved a lot of the workflow to make it easier to contribute and share your news. A major technical goal of version 3 was performance and scalability. A lot of work was done w/ Danga’s memcached to cache session, anon anonymous pages, variables, menu, taxonomy, etc. as well as some expensive functions.
Our team continues to grow; we’ve got a bunch of really smart and talented people helping us. In addition to an awesome and growing team of Drupal rock stars (note, we are hiring - please contact me if you are interested in learning more), with the launch of v3 we are announcing many new advisors: Dan Gillmor, JD Lasica, Howard Rheingold, and Dries have all come on as advisors.
Have a look at our latest incarnation. If you’ve got any feedback please let us know!
any plans for local channels?
I plan to release a local community site. I was thinking that if I could pull a set of content pertinent to my local area from NowPublic, that would be cool.
Also, I could contribute to NowPublic by allowing my users to post their news on my site & I could syndicate to your site. Any plans for that?
dado
http://schtickdisc.org
We offer feeds for everything
We offer feeds for pretty much everything - for users (footage, stories, or all contributions by a user), for all tags (both footage and stories), for popular or recent news and footage, for all recent posts, etc. and we welcome anyone to pull and use these feeds (check out netvibes.com). If we don't have a feed you would like, let us know and we'll add it - next on our feed to do list is support for multiple taxonomy terms, i.e. Boston and Sports).
Tags/Feeds:
http://www.nowpublic.com/tag/vancouver
http://www.nowpublic.com/taxonomy/term/320/all/feed?filter=news
http://www.nowpublic.com/tag/drupal?filter=footage
http://www.nowpublic.com/taxonomy/term/1316/all/feed?filter=footage
We are also hard at work at making it easier for people to syndicate content back to NP. We currently offer a tool called RSS Tracker that allows you to convert one or more items from any RSS feed(s) into a story. This requires some individual/manual interaction to select and tag the stories -- as opposed to say sucking a feed in and automatically converting... tho we could develop such a mechanism for a specific source/partner.
We have a lot of plugins in the works not to mention an API that will allow you to do much more custom integration... expect a lot of exciting announcements from us in the coming weeks.
a deeper look
I find it very interesting, and I am thinking about implementing something semilar for Arabic langauge for example.. but I would like to ask if it would be possible to get more information about the current implementation.. what modules were used for different features, the basic templates, modification to core if any, and so on.. is there any chance that such think is open for our own eyes pleasure ?
building all the
Great site, with many good features. Do you plan to release part of your code to drupal's community in the form of contributed modules?
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Webmaster Resources | Canadian Directory
Great Site
I have been looking into how users can creat their own password. How did you get around that?
Use the LoginTobbogan.module
Use the LoginTobbogan.module to provide users the option of defining their own password at registration.
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Custom Drupal templates | More Drupal modules
Uploading & Downloading
I would like to know what module(s) you used for the GUI uploading and downloading interface, if you don't mind?
~ xi0n
Technology
The site looks fantastic. It's great to see Drupal constantly lifted to new heights!
Is the release of the code in some form being considered? I do hope so, because I work with a small non-profit that would like to start a citizen journalism site, and what you have built here looks like it would give us a huge leg up. Plus, we would be able to contribute development back to you.