[http://lwn.net/Articles/324036/] ===== Campsite offers plug-and-play freedom of the press March 18, 2009
This article was contributed by Nathan Willis The non-profit Media Development Loan Fund (MDLF) released a major upgrade to its online journalism content management system (CMS) Campsite last week. [...] MDLF's mission is to support independent journalists and media organizations, so that they are "strong enough to hold governments to account, expose corruption and drive systemic change." Founded in 1996, it provides funding to independent media in 23 countries, made possible through private donations and public grants. MDLF describes tools as the key investments for independent media, including printing presses, radio and television transmitters, and software. Campsite and the other CAMP projects grew out of MDLF's need to provide low-cost, open source software for new media outlets. [...] Campsite's back-end allows an organization to replicate the newspaper workflow: authors can create and edit stories, submitting them to the editors when ready; editors can alter them, schedule them to run at predetermines times, change their visibility, move them between sections, and ultimately approve their publication. The system also handles administrative tasks like managing subscriptions, tracking article views, and moderating reader comments. A single back-end can also run multiple publications with different rules, schedules, layouts, and subscription lists and policies. [...] Campsite is written in PHP and is designed to run on Apache servers using MySQL. The manual cites Apache 2.0.x, PHP 5.0, and MySQL 5.0 as the minimum version dependencies, and requires ImageMagick to handle graphics. In addition, you must run PHP as an Apache module, not as CGI, and there is a short list of required PHP directives to set up in the installation's php.ini file. Campsite runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and Mac OS X servers. No current Linux distributions are known to include Campsite, although from time to time users have shared their own home-brewed packages. [...] The press release for Campsite 3.2 notes that independent media in developing countries have long operated on limited funds that preclude the expensive CMS solutions preferred by other organizations — the very situation that drives MDLF's software projects. But it also points out that newspapers in the "developed" world are facing a financial crisis of their own. Consequently, an open source CMS like Campsite makes more sense than ever. [...] ===== -- Soh Kam Yung my Google Reader Shared links: (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/16851815156817689753) my Google Reader Shared SFAS links: (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/16851815156817689753/label/sfas) _______________________________________________ Slugnet mailing list [email protected] http://wiki.lugs.org.sg/LugsMailingListFaq http://www.lugs.org.sg/mailman/listinfo/slugnet
