Core Publisher, built on Drupal 7 by NPR Digital Services

Dear Core Publishers,

And here is what we did this sprint (*Code-Name Brian).

Drupal Update

On Sunday night we updated Core Publisher to the most recent version of Drupal, 7.10. This update improves site performance and security, and fixes some bugs. That work was an “all hands on deck” kind of project that occupied developers’ time for most of the sprint.

Audio Direct to CDN

All sites are now configured to upload audio direct to CDN (yay!) and all newly installed sites will upload audio this way by default. Also, since audio is not being processed through the API, we took all audio processing out of the ingest module.

River Data

Our analyst took a look at how users are interacting with the river-style homepage, to inform us on how various river features are faring. More on that later.

Layout Engine Preview

The feature is flexible and has been created to provide newsrooms control on presenting manually curated content without worrying about time stamps.

You will be able to feature one or three stories with images, slugs and headlines. From highlighting different top stories or focusing on a big story with multiple angles, the versatility with this feature is exciting.

Contact your client services manager to be trained on managing this feature.

Hello Core Publishers,

Due to the large number of stations that will be onboarding to CP in the new year, the CP development team worked updating and improving site configurations on install.

Permissions

To that end we added some permissions to the install. Many already exist on install; we are simply adding to the list with the items below. 

• Person, page, program: Editor, Station Admins, and NPR Admins now have all permissions for these content types.
• NPR story (retrieving stories from the API) and quickstats (editing which stories are in the most active stories block: Editor, Station Admins, and NPR Admins now all have access
• Layout Engine: On install, only station admins and NPR admins will have permission to access the layout engine. That can be adjusted at the station site level.
• All media permissions: NPR Admins now have access.

Hello Core Warriors,

Short and sweet this week.

Wonky-ish stuff:

•  Created image entities so that we can start work on a media manager that handles images as well as audio.
• Did a full audit of blocks (page components) so that we can define what will be available for the layout engine.
• Fixed the date selector on radio schedules.
• Made the getData() function only call the PBS API if it is meant to call the PBS API.
• Cleaned up the GSA boxes.

New Features:

• TV and radio schedules now combined in one drop down on schedules pages.
• YouTube videos are now being retrieved from the NPR API. (cheer!)
• We are posting NPR posts’ “teaser” so stories will now show up with text.
• Podcasts now being titled by a page’s title tag.

More Analytics:

Hello Core Publishers!

This sprint we focused on clearing out a bunch of annoying defects and we worked on big projects around onboarding joint licensees and allowing for a more modular homepage.

From the top, DEFECTS tackled.

For everyone: 

• Station branding is maintained when in maintenance mode.

Sites go into “maintenance mode” for a few minutes (users can see a few pages deep, however) when we deploy new features and bug fixes. This is why we do that deploy at 10 PM. A few weeks ago we noticed that stations were losing their header during these time periods, so we fixed that.

• Links fixed in RSS feeds.

Sometimes the links in a station’s RSS feeds did not go to a site’s canonical URL. Fixed!

• Stories no longer multiply ingested.

Hello Fellow Core Publishers,

Another two weeks, another set of features and defects handled. During this sprint we had a major push on fixing audio. Good news revealed below!

But I will start with some smaller defects tackled.

Related to legacy defects, we cleaned up the following styling issues. 

• Not enough line-height when links went long in “links” style block.
• Scroll bar showed up when skybox title went to three lines.
• Mini teaser description text was blue (should be black).
• Disqus comment field aligned with bottom of right rail, (should align with the bottom of the post).

Related to the “Now Playing Block,” sometimes the streams never loaded. 

• For whole host of reasons (a combination of cookies, browser behavior, a tiny AJAX flaw, Varnish, and a Drupal SEO module), sometimes a station’s “Now Playing” block did not load. We did a hotfix before the sprint ended to fix this issue–you should not see it again.