Newscoop 4.0 Beta adds new community features to open source news CMS

Newscoop, the open source content management system for online news media, has a new major release out in beta. Newscoop 4.0 adds the possibility to build a community platform into a news website, allowing newspapers to grow and manage vibrant communities around their content.

The feature was developed in close partnership with the groundbreaking Swiss online-print news hybrid TagesWoche, who attracted 2500 people into their community in the first week following their October launch. Newscoop has primarily found a niche powering independently online publications like TagesWoche, El Faro, the first digital newspaper in Latin America, or West Africa Democracy Radio, who were honoured this year with the Knight-Batten Innovations in Journalism Award for their use of Newscoop.

More information and free downloads are available at http://sourcefabric.org/en/newscoop/latestrelease .

Other features included in Newscoop 4.0, which will see its full public release in early 2012, include improved themes, with which complex platforms can be redesigned with one click. Sourcefabric will launch their Theme Park in 2012 featuring a library of free, 100% customisable themes.

Article Playlists now allow editors and journalists to easily create lists of articles and display them on their site, making it easy to create articles round-ups or particular news focuses. With Related Articles, journalists can now ‘relate’ articles to other articles from the Article Edit screen, allowing connections to be made between stories regardless of the author or topic (a feature TagesWoche uses for their acclaimed in-depth feature Dossiers).

Overhauled comments, article webcodes that allow linking from a print edition, a feedback messaging system and numerous bug fixes and other performance tweaks complete the release.