The Open Source NewsCloud Community Starter Blog

Open source jobs for NewsCloud at Elance

We're beginning to post some small to moderate open source jobs for the NewsCloud platform at Elance. You can bid on these projects for pay or let us know if you'd like to volunteer your time to the open source effort. We'll continue to add more as time goes on. This is a great way to get involved in a cool open source social media project funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Amazon Payments (FPS) integration with NewsCloud Rails 3.x platform (medium)

Integrate JQuery Autocomplete & Suggestion Tag to NewsCloud forms (small)

Add Flickr & YouTube RSS Feed Support to NewsCloud Platform using Feedzirra (small, Feedzirra support for stories already in place)

Upgrade NewsCloud OSS Platform to Jquery Masonry to 2.1 (small)

Build WordPress importer for open source NewsCloud platform (medium)

Host NewsCloud for Free for Six Months

The great folks at Rackspace are offering six months credited hosting (aka free) for anyone that wants to startup a NewsCloud community using the Rackspace cloud.

Release 3.4 with OmniAuth & Facebook Authentication Support is Available

NewsCloud's Release 3.4 is now available. This release supports OAuth 2.0 authentication changes that Facebook required October 1, 2011. And, it includes the Ruby OmniAuth gem for authenticating users from OpenID, Google, Twitter, Name/Password and other services. 

Note: We've temporarily discontinued Facebook canvas support as they now require SSL. We may add this back in the future if Facebook makes the canvas area more valuable again. For now, we run our sites as community web sites that integrate via Facebook using OmniAuth, Open Graph and other open services.

 

Upcoming Changes Coming to NewsCloud

All of Facebook's upcoming Oct 1 changes to authentication and it's new Timeline are requiring that we update NewsCloud to support their new libraries. So, we have some big changes coming to the codebase this next week:

1) NewsCloud will soon support the Ruby OmniAuth gem allowing users to login with a variety of services that you as the publisher can choose. We still think there is great value in sticking to well-authenticated identity services like Facebook, but Twitter and Google can work well. Name and password is also an option. We've heard a lot of requests for this - so hopefully you'll be excited by this!

2) Likes in NewsCloud will now be optionally tied to native Facebook Like's. This will insure that when people like stuff on your community site, it will appear in the user's Timeline.

3) We're temporarily discontinuing support for Facebook canvas Applications inside Facebook. In other words, http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp will not be supported whereas http://yourapp.com Facebook Connect website will be. There are a few reasons for this. One is that Facebook Canvas Apps now require SSL certificates - which is a good thing, but costs extra for our clients and partners and are more difficult to manage in a shared hosting environment. The other is that Facebook isn't providing any advantage to application developers anymore for running inside the canvas - all it does is allow Facebook to make money off your site traffic. We think that given the OmniAuth integration of other services, NewsCloud is currently best run as an independent web community site with multiple services. Learn more about the difference between Facebook applications and Facebook Connect websites.

We've always kept NewsCloud as a free, open source platform that works with a variety of services (not just proprietary to Facebook) but we're now contemplating deeper moves away from Facebook-dependence - so that our interactive community features can be used more widely by a variety of adopters. 

So, follow us on @newscloud for updates as these changes go live on github!

Goals of NewsCloud's Design Updates

We're currently working on an update to the NewsCloud design with our friends at Blink Interactive in Seattle. Here are a few of our goals:

1. Improve the last major design upgrade (as seen on The Needle). We want to tune the widgets so that they better use space and encourage interactivty. We also want to tune the aesthetic of fonts and spacing. We really want to hone in on the specific set of default widgets for a social media home page that encourage participation and sharing. You can check out some early wireframes on the update from Blink.

2. We're creating two new themes so that open source users will have three themes overall to choose from when launching their site. And, of course, they can use any of these as a starting point to customize.

Read up on our current Knight Foundation grant to make Facebook-connected communities easy.

Easy NewsCloud Install Now Available

Now you can install NewsCloud in just a few minutes on a $45 per month hosting account. Learn more. 

Run NewsCloud at Rackspace for $45 per month

If you're looking for an affordable way to run NewsCloud, we've just released an installation script which works great with Rackspace's $45 monthly 1 GB cloud server. It also should work with any standard Ubuntu 10.04 server. 

Release 3.2 stable offers the Ubuntu installation script which we've tested at Rackspace. With this script, you should be able to get your NewsCloud community up and running within 30 - 45 minutes.

While this installation script is primarily aimed at open source developers, by the end of June we plan to offer an automated Chef-based installation which will drastically simplify this process for non-technical folks. 

You may want to review our installation support FAQs which offer a checklist of setup prerequisites. Three things you'll need to run your community are 1) A domain name or subdomain 2) Registration for a Facebook application and 3) a server for hosting, such as at Rackspace.

Please let us know if you try out the script. Post your feedback and questions at http://support.newscloud.com

This work is funded by our May 2011 Knight Foundation grant: NewsCloud to Make Facebook-connected Communities Easy and Affordable.

 

 

NewsCloud Release 3.1 Runs on Rails 2.3.11

Great news. NewsCloud's open source platform is now running on Rails 2.3.11. This should help developers interested in deploying sites and getting involved with our community.

Release 3.1 Stable is available for download at Github now.

Over the next month we'll be focusing on trying to fit NewsCloud into Amazon's AWS Cloud micro-instance, which offers free hosting to new accounts for one year. Learn more.

Up Next: Migrating NewsCloud to Ruby on Rails 2.3.11

On the path towards making NewsCloud easier to set up and use, we're migrating our code base up to Ruby on Rails 2.3.11. This will generally make it easier for developers wishing to try out the code. It's also going to give us a more current base to work from as we work on configuration for additional hosting solutions. We're planning to provide an alternate Release 3.0 (3.0a) when this is complete.

Knight Foundation to Continue Support for NewsCloud to Make Facebook-Connected Communities Easy

We are very grateful for the continued support of the Knight Foundation: NewsCloud to make Facebook-connected communities easy. We hope you'll learn more about our project, set up your own site or get involved as a developer!