Updated: See Social Media Toolkit Alpha v0.11 with RSS, Twitter posting, Google Site Maps, ReCaptcha, Mobile support, blog page with SimplePie integration and ad rotation.
I am happy to share an early testing release of the NewsCloud Social Media Toolkit with you.
Alpha Release of Social Media Toolkit
What is it?
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The Social Media Toolkit (SMT), is an open source platform designed to help organizations run community-driven, topic-based and geo-centric news websites, similar to NewsCloud.com, albeit simpler and more streamlined. You can see examples of the SMT running here: http://election.newsi.us, http://sarahpalin.newsi.us, http://seattle.newsi.us, http://tech.newsi.us and http://climate.newsi.us.
The alpha release is a preliminary testing release to gather feedback from organizations and open source developers. The initial alpha feature set and design/stylesheets are very basic - but show the potential of the new toolkit. We hope to add more features and improve the default design in the near future.
What can I do with the Social Media Toolkit
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Essentially, you can quickly set up and publish one or more topic-specific news sites with great social media features such as registration, voting, comments, newswires, posting and resource links. Stories are initially seeded from NewsCloud's topic clouds. It's easy to create new topic clouds if you want to. (During the test period, the SMT is restricted to approved clouds. If you would like to propose a new topic related to your organization or are interested in using the SMT for commercial purposes, please email us.) Organizations with similar missions can also collaborate to moderate specific topics.
How is it different from previous NewsCloud code releases?
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Until now, many people had difficulty running their own version of NewsCloud because of the complexity of installing the entire platform. The alpha release of the SMT is the first standalone PHP version to be easily installable and customizable. The SMT is also the first remote NewsCloud module to use a local cache for fast performance. Almost all activities performed by readers on the SMT is managed locally for end user responsiveness (the SMT synchronizes content with the NewsCloud server regularly in the background).
While the toolkit provides basic media features such as top stories, comments, voting and newswires today, the long term vision of the SMT is to expand the capabilities of the service and provide technical solutions for organizations to run their news sites on any technology platform they choose e.g. PHP, Facebook Application, Drupal, Plone, Adobe AIR, et al.
With additional support, we plan to integrate our existing Facebook application framework and Drupal module into the new SMT architecture in the future. This will provide a Facebook application that performs the same functionality as the new PHP version. Similarly, the Drupal module will provide the same functionality on any Drupal-based website.
The SMT is distinct from the overall NewsCloud Media Platform (http://wiki.newscloud.com/index.php/NewsCloud_Open_Source_Media_Platform) and NewsCloud Web Services API (http://www.newscloud.org/index.php/Guide_to_Web_Services) in that is meant to provide a complete, standalone solution with a simpler and easier to manage framework.
The SMT is also different than the earlier Facebook Newsroom CMS (http://www.newscloud.org/index.php/Facebook_Newsroom_CMS) and the Drupal Newsroom Module (http://www.newscloud.org/index.php/Drupal_Newsroom_Module) because these aren't integrated into the SMT core engine which provides a high performance local cache.
Where can learn more and download the the code?
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We encourage you to sign up for our developer forum at Google Groups:
http://groups.google.com/group/newscloud/
You can get more information at the NewsCloud Wiki:
http://www.newscloud.org/index.php/Social_media_toolkit
You can download the code at SourceForge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/newscloudsmt/
Tell me more about the technical details
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While we have earlier beta versions of the Facebook and Drupal Newsroom add-ons, this alpha SMT release only provides PHP support based on a new, more robust web services architecture.
The alpha SMT runs on PHP 4.x or 5.x and MySQL. It is open source. It is easily installable. It requires no external components such as PEAR (except for PHP 4.x) or htaccess.
It is easy to customize. All the constants, stylesheets and templates are separated from the core codebase. You can run multiple sites without creating multiple installations of the codebase. Each instance of the sites above was configured in less than 30 minutes. All run on the same server from a single copy of the codebase. This limits the complexity of patching and updating code on multiple publications.
End user features include top stories, newswires, voting, comments, registration and sign up, et al. Technical features include AJAX, high performance caching, version management for scripts and stylesheets and remote synchronization with NewsCloud.com. The overall architecture relies on the NewsCloud Cloud service via a simplified web service API. Eventually, we'd like to be able to provide an open source version of the cloud server, but at this time using NewsCloud.com is the only option.
This is an early alpha test release. The code and database structure may change significantly before the beta release. Please post bugs and feature requests to our Google developers group. We hope to expand the feature set, polish and support for other platforms in the coming months.
The readme.txt in the source download provides installation and customization instructions.
How can I get involved?
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If you are interested in joining our open source developer team, sign up at the NewsCloud Developer Forum on Google Groups and email us at the address below.
Hosting and commercial projects
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If your organization is interested in hiring someone to host and customize a SMT-based publication or f you are interested in hiring someone to host and customize SMT-based publication(s) for commercial purposes, please contact us at the address below.
Contact information
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email: jeff@newscloud.com
