Broadcaster is a theme for the Newscoop content management system from Sourcefabric. The design is by Aleksander Baćko Jeličič and Pete Haughie, based on the Rockstar theme by Stephanie Miebach and Christian Kobben.
The distinctive feature of this theme is the integration with the Airtime broadcast automation system. There are widgets for stream playback and display of the schedule fetched via the Airtime API from your broadcast station, as well as Article Types designed for a typical station with an article for each show in the schedule. The Broadcaster theme demo site uses sample data from Sourcefabric Radio.
Like Newscoop, the 'Broadcaster' theme is © Sourcefabric 2015 and released under the GNU General Public License, version 3.
Important: If you go to the theme page and not to the release page, the 'Download this repository as a zip file' button on GitHub exports Newscoop theme files within a folder, whereas a working Newscoop theme should have its main template files in the zip file root. Please always take the file from the Broadcaster theme release page directly to get the correct file structure. Any Newscoop theme should have its main template files in the zip file root.
First, ensure that the Public Airtime API is enabled in Airtime System Preferences. Then install Newscoop as shown in the Newscoop user manual.
The Newscoop administration interface includes a theme management and template editing tool, which you can find by clicking Configure on the main navigation menu, then Themes. A new theme can be added to Newscoop by clicking the Import theme button on the Theme management page. This action opens a dialog box which enables you to select a theme file from your computer. Click the Browse button to locate the theme's zip file, then click the Import button. Newscoop should report that the import was successful. The new theme should now be displayed in the table on the Theme management page.
The Broadcaster theme uses several Article Types to display content in different ways. Each Article Type has specific fields of various kinds. The news and page Article Types are standard in Newscoop, but the Broadcaster theme uses additional custom Article Types. These are the Article Types required, and the fields they should contain:
-
news (standard Article Type):
- highlight (switch) - to promote the article in lists
- deck (Multi-line Text with WYSIWYG) - page description in meta and Open Graph tags
- full_text (Multi-line Text with WYSIWYG) - body text for the article
-
page (standard Article Type):
- full_text (Multi-line Text with WYSIWYG) - body text for the article
-
Player (custom Article Type):
- player (Single-line Text) - used for the stream player widget
-
show (custom Article Type):
- show_name (Single-line Text) - the name of the show
- host (Single-line Text) - the presenter of the show
- deck (Multi-line Text) - page description in meta and Open Graph tags
- full_text (Multi-line Text with WYSIWYG) - body text for the article
- shows (Multi-line Text) - for SoundCloud links if you have them
- show_times (Complex Date) - dates of the show in question
-
Program_Grid (custom Article Type):
- program_grid (Multi-line Text) - used for the program grid widget
In the Newscoop administration interface, click Configure on the main navigation menu, then Article Types. If the Article Types shown above are not listed, you will have to create them, as shown in the manual chapter Article Types.
Within the custom Article Type of show, the fields should look like this:
The social media, Airtime widget and stream settings for your station can be found in the theme file _conf/settings.tpl which you can edit from within Newscoop's theme management page, if you wish.
Typically you will want to have some static pages such as 'About us' or 'Contribute' on your Newscoop site. The Broadcaster theme accommodates this desire, so that links to articles in your first issue and section appear in the left side of the page header. For example, your first issue could be called static and contain a section called pages, although you can name this issue and section anything you want. It does not matter if you use the news or page Article Type for this type of article, but only news articles show up in the RSS feed by default.
More topical content should be placed in second and subsequent issues. These articles are handled differently, with the Latest News articles displayed on the homepage. Up to four featured articles are given the most prominent treatment on the homepage, rotating in a carousel. These articles need to be placed in a Featured Article List named Carousel-en, where -en is the language code for English content. For more information on Featured Article Lists, see the manual chapter Managing Content.
The Broadcaster theme uses the section number to provide different treatments to specific sections. The default issue 1, for static content, contains three sections:
- 5 Pages
- 10 Application pages
- 50 RSS placeholder
The first 200 characters of the first article in the Pages section (number 5) is displayed in the About Us box on the front page of the publication. The Section Template for the RSS placeholder must be set to rss.tpl for the RSS feed to be rendered correctly.
Within the special section Application pages there are two articles, with the following Article Types:
- player (Player)
- Program Grid (Program_Grid)
By default, issue 10 contains two sections:
- 60 News
- 100 Shows
The News section includes articles of type news and the Shows section includes articles of type shows, as you might expect.
These are only the default behaviours, as like all Newscoop themes, Broadcaster can be customised to be what you need it to be.
The reference text for developing Newscoop themes is the Newscoop Cookbook. If you would like to contribute your tips and tricks to this book, please contact Sourcefabric.