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!

Comments

dado’s picture

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

michaelemeyers’s picture

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.

Isam Bayazidi’s picture

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 ?

capmex’s picture

building all the functionality of the newsroom into tools that are free for anyone to use.

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?
--
Webmaster Resources | Canadian Directory

Mephist0’s picture

I have been looking into how users can creat their own password. How did you get around that?

budda’s picture

Use the LoginTobbogan.module to provide users the option of defining their own password at registration.

--
Custom Drupal templates | More Drupal modules

xi0n’s picture

I would like to know what module(s) you used for the GUI uploading and downloading interface, if you don't mind?

~ xi0n

grupalduru’s picture

The average load time of this site is ~10s... they need to optimize the heck out of it...

shamio’s picture

I think the website is optimized well but the reason of low speed loading, is the size of home page. The size of home page is something near 1 Mb which is high and its the reason of low speed loading. Its better to reduce to size of home page to load faster for all visitors specially those one who use average speed internet connections.

ppro’s picture

actualy the page load speed of the site is great for me but I have some suggestions:

1- they should specify the image dimensions
2- defer parsing JavaScript to reduce blocking of page rendering
3- combine images using CSS sprites

otherwise they have done a great job!

----------------
ParsiGate.com | SwedData.com

Stefan174’s picture

I disagree shamio. I used "Page Speed Online" by Google : https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/ and I got "PageSpeed Score of 91 (out of 100)" this Page is not slow at all, also there are no High priority suggestion, so the site is well optimized :)

shamio’s picture

I agree you and what i said is exactly what you say. I said the website has a big home page and if it loads slowly, it probably depends on your internet connection and the site loads fast for high speed connections and i said its better to optimize and reduce the size of home page to help users who use low speed connections to visit website faster and high speed users don't have any problem for loading pages.

tazonne’s picture

I use page speed tyoo at my site ( Jocuri Online ) and I get an average of 89-90 score, I have tryed to improve it, but it's allot of work because I have to resize all the images. Maybe I will find a custom script to do this ...

strangeways’s picture

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.

jaxon77’s picture

Any idea how to speed up the forums? It literally takes nearly ten seconds to load a page. I'm trying to find a solution myself.