Features
This is an overview of what campsite can currently do, written for those assessing differences between various media publishing systems. You can also try out a demo of the Campsite administration interface here.
Campsite is set apart from other tools in a few major ways:
- User-friendly. Campsite is written specifically for newspapers and magazines, and that means our users are journalists and editors. In addition, we assume that some journalists may have little or no experience with computers and so we’ve made the interfaces easy to understand and users are only shown those actions which they have the right to use. Tasks are made to use as few clicks as possible, and common tasks are made to be quick and simple. Other systems are not customized to the particular tasks that journalists and editors must perform every day.
- Multi-lingual content. All content in Campsite can be translated. There are no other open-source tools that support this feature. Supporting multi-lingual content is a huge undertaking that cannot be easily added to an existing application because every interface in the application needs to be changed.
- Management features for newspapers: issue publishing, exclusive content for subscribers, multi-media content, content categories, subscriber comments, WYSIWYG editor, article locking (so only one journalist can work on an article at a time), and timed release of articles or issues.
- Subscription management with fine-grain control over what content your subscribers have access to. There is support for corporate accounts using IP-based subscriptions.
- Total design freedom. You can make your site look however you like, Campsite does not have any sort of predefined "block" layout.
- Community or guaranteed support. Campware can guarantee a 24-hour response time and can help you fix problems on your server.
- On-demand features. If you need Campsite to do something that it doesnt do currently, we can add it in for a very reasonable cost in a timely manner.
The follow list enumerates all the features in detail:
Languages- The Campsite administration interface has been translated into the following languages (in alphabetical order):
- Arabic
- Chinese
- Croatian
- Czech
- Dutch
- English
- German
- Korean
- Portuguese
- Romanian
- Russian
- Serbian (Cyrillic)
- Serbo-Croatian (Latin)
- Spanish
- Swedish
- Further translations can be added using a tool built into Campsite called the "Localizer".
Content Features- Multi-lingual content: all of the content that you create in Campsite can be translated:
- Articles
- Sections
- Issues
- Publications
- Topics (content categorization)
- File attachment descriptions
- Online WYSIWYG editor for article editing
- Typical style formatting: bold, italic, etc.
- Special support for linking to existing (internal) articles
- Ability to split articles into multiple pages
- Insert images into your articles
- Copy & Paste clean text from MSWord or OpenOffice (while preserving bold and italics)
- Support for multiple simultaneous users
- While a journalist is editing an article, it is "locked". A warning will be displayed if anyone else tries to edit the article at the same time. This prevents one journalist from deleting the work of another.
- Group articles into sections
- Group sections into an issue
- Release an issue all at once
- Allow subscribers to access only certain issues
- Scheduled Publishing: automatically publish articles or issues at some time in the future. For articles, you can schedule the following actions:
- publish
- unpublish
- show the article on the front page
- remove the article from front page
- show the article on the section page
- remove the article from the section page
- Topics: Categorize your content
- Define however many topics you like
- Associate any number of topics to an article
- Topic can have subtopics, subtopics can have sub-subtopics, etc.
- Topics can be translated
- Dynamic, Flexible Article Types
- "Article Types" allow you to define your own article format – you arent limited to just "Introduction" and "Body" fields, for instance. An Article Type consists of a series of data fields.
- You can define any number and combination of the following field types:
- date field
- single-line text field
- multiple-line text field with WYSIWYG editor
- drop-down selection containing a list of topics
- Reorder how the fields are displayed in the admin interface
- Hide fields that are no longer in use
- Translate the field names
- Change the data type for a field
- Image Manager
- View/search all of the images in the system
- Edit image metadata
File Attachments
- Comments
- Readers can make comments to articles
- Comments can be linked to a forum
- Allow anyone to comment, or just subscribers
- Comments can be moderated
- Built-in spam prevention
- Works with SSL on both the frontend and backend
Subscriber Management- Control access to your content via:
- User’s IP Address (for corporate accounts)
- Login/password (individual users)
- Control what content your subscribers have access to:
- The entire issue
- Specific sections in each issue
- Specific sections in a particular language
- Ability to have a trial subscription period
- Set your own pay periods (the time between each payment made by a subscriber)
Site Design- Campsite has its own template language specifically made for news sites. It allows you to customize your site however you want.
- You have access to the following data objects:
- publications
- issues
- sections
- articles
- topics
- current user
- current language (e.g. automatically show the user an article in their language)
- Control statements: IF and LIST
- Include other templates
Administration- Fine-grained access control, you can create different user types such as:
- journalists
- editors
- photographers
- photo editors
- subscriber managers
- site administrators
- Logging
- All administration actions are logged
- Security
- Login page secured against automated scripting attacks with a CAPTCHA
- Login password is encrypted when sent to the server
- Backup
- Command-line "backup" and "restore" scripts make it easy to backup your entire site and restore it with one command. You can also easily transfer your site from one server to another using these scripts.
- Automated Feedback and Bug Reporting
- If something goes wrong in the administration interface, a
special screen will appear which allows you to submit the problem back
to the Campsite team.
- You can also submit feedback directly in the admin interface, such as suggestions or feature requests.
Developers- Completely open-source LAMP development stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP)
- Easy to use object-oriented API to develop plugins or alternative interfaces
- Easy-to-read code
- Open development process – all planning, specs, and reviews are done in the open. Developing Campsite is a community process.
Support- Community support is available via mailing lists.
- Per-incident support.
- Guaranteed support contracts ensure a 24-hour response time.
- If you need additional features in Campsite, they can be ordered at a very reasonable cost and delivered in a timely manner.
- Campsite has a team of full-time developers working to make Campsite easier to use with the features you want.
What you need to run Campsite
The Campsite server runs on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS X.
The Campsite client side works in most modern Web browsers:
Mozilla, Firefox, and MS
Internet Explorer.
