NewsCloud's Community Starter Blog

Sneak Preview of NewsCloud 2011 - 2012 Roadmap: Simplicity & Affordability

Update: Here's our grant announcement NewsCloud to make Facebook-connected communities easy.

I wanted to give folks a quick preview of our planned roadmap for NewsCloud's open source Facebook community platform. Primarily, we'll focus on making running the NewsCloud platform simpler and more affordable to make it more accessible to a variety of news organizations, community groups and individuals.

There are two key areas of focus, initially:

1) Making the open source code base easier to install, set up and manage.

2) Making the open source code base installable on hosting environments that are more economical such as the Amazon AWS MicroInstance which is free for one year.

We're currently finishing up some design improvements to the current platform and expect to have a third stable release available in April. We expect the initial simplicity and affordability initiative improvements to start rolling out in June and July, 2011.

Ruby on Rails developers can install our current stable or daily code from Github today. Share your thoughts and questions. 

We'll provide more information in the coming months. Follow us @newscloud to keep up with the latest updates.

How to integrate your blog with NewsCloud

Last week, SheMuses set up a new Wordpress blog and integrated her NewsCloud journal in just a few minutes. It's a good example of how other bloggers can easily integrate breaking news with their blog.

In Wordpress, there is a widget for RSS feeds - so it took Jodie just a few minutes to drag the RSS widget to her template and link it up with her RSS address of her NewsCloud journal.

Technorati Tags: wordpress