What a week for us here at Digital Services. We launched our 50th station and our first site using our new Layout Engine tool.

Consider WKAR the cherry on top of our Core Publisher sundae, as they are our newest Core Publisher station site!

WKAR provides news and music for the Michigan area. You can visit them at Michigan State University, or at http://wkar.org.

WSIU is our newest Core Publisher station. This is a pretty special site launch, because WSIU is the first station to go live using our new Layout Engine. You’ll notice that we’ve added some new blocks and tools to the homepage to help stations serve their listeners and web visitors better.

You can see WSIU’s treatment of the Layout Engine at http://news.wsiu.org. We’d love to hear your feedback!

This is a big week for us, because we are celebrating the launch of our fiftieth site. WESM is our Golden station!

WESM is based on the campus of University of Maryland, Eastern Shore. Providing “Jazz, blues and so much more”, they can be found at http://wesm913.org.

Core Publisher – the family that grows and learns together, is awesome together!

WWNO, based at the University of New Orleans, recently launched their new Core Publisher site at http://wwno.org.

Welcome to the Core Publisher family, WWNO!

We are happy to announce two new Core Publisher stations. We’ve been quite the busy bees recently.

You can visit WKU Public Radio, based out of Western Kentucky University, at http://wkyufm.org.

Across the map, but only a few clicks away, you can check out Northwest Public Radio (NWPR)’s new Core Publisher site at http://www.nwpr.org!

KIOS‘s tagline is “News, Jazz and so much More”. I wonder if that “so much more” refers to their brand new Core Publisher site?

You can check it out at http://www.kios.org.

We are excited to welcome Tri States Public Radio, also known as WIUM/WIUW, to the Core Publisher family. Providing NPR news and music for western Illinois and parts of Iowa and Missouri, you can visit them (and their gorgeous rotating masthead images) at http://www.tristatesradio.com.

The term “Space Coast” used to make me think of Space Ghost and Star Trek. Now, it will make me think of new Core Publisher station WFIT – Public Radio for the Space Coast!

You can visit WFIT at http://www.wfit.org!

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

We did some finishing touches on the layout engine preview and will be QAing the heck out of it over the next few weeks. Also, more on that later.

Yours, Erin

*Sprints are named in alphabetical order. A new sprint every two weeks equals 26 sprints; there are 26 letters in the alphabet; you get it. This year we are giving sprints code names. The first sprint was “Alfred,” this sprint is “Brian,” next up is “Camille.” If you can guess how these names are related you win a no-prize from Digital Services, which may turn into an actual prize. Good luck!

Outline below of new features and fixes we pushed Wednesday evening. If you have questions about any of these items, please contact your client services manager.

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.

CMS ADMIN ENHANCEMENT – Featured Content Rotator
Producers are no longer limited to defining 4 stories within the admin panel for the rotator. Producers can now add additional rows to the feature rotator “table queue,” allowing for a quicker way to update the rotator. Use the drag and drop functionality to freshen up content more efficiently. The rotator will only display the top 4 stories listed in the admin panel. And, preview functionality has been added to allow you to check your changes before publishing.

POST PRESENTATION ENHANCEMENTS

Related Content
You will notice related stories are no longer a bulleted list of headlines at the bottom of the post. The bulleted list has been updated to a rotator of related stories displaying the story image, slug and headline. Two stories will display then rotate to the next two every 5 seconds. Scrolling arrows to the left and right of the related content will allow the visitor to manually scroll through the stories.

Tags
Tag treatment has changed to be more readable by making them bold and adding more space between tags.

BACKEND CLEAN UP & DEFECT FIXES
DS removed a deprecated CSS theme being used in Core Publisher. This update will make page load lighter and front-end development much more efficient.

DS performed a query within the Core Publisher database to find cloned people page instances.

When a user shares a story from a Core Publisher site to Facebook, the main story image will be published along with the link to the story.

Your station’s Twitter handle is included when a user shares a Live Event.

DS removed “editor” and “root” from the list of Drupal users on people pages.

New process put into place that will eliminate the double audio uploading when a station configured to upload audio the “new way,” edits a post with audio uploaded the “new way.” More details will follow in a separate email regarding this change.

DS OPEN SOURCE UPDATE –Development Module

As part of our work towards open sourcing, we have put a development version of a module on drupal.org that will provide the structure for retrieval and ingest to the NPR API.