Digital manuals for a digital media

There's been a huge amount of furious scribbling and typing going on in the Sourcefabric team. With two new product manuals, a new online manual library and platform, two extensive Newscoop developers guides and a booksprint in the planning, no wonder. We even found time to make actual books, with pages and covers. Without further ado, here's the official field guide to Sourcefabric's documentation for digital media.

Newscoop 3 for Journalists and Editors

From the press, for the press. Our most comprehensive manual ever just got better. Everything you ever wanted to know about installation, set-up, administration and publishing on our open source content management system for professional journalists. Written by 64 Studio's Daniel James, you'll also find full feature lists, some great tips and tricks and easy, user-centred guides to creating content. We just printed a batch to take to a new project in Senegal and they look great.

Available free online, as a epub, or a pdf.

Newscoop 3 Cookbook

We'll be writing a Newscoop 3 cookbook at a booksprint in April. It'll be your guide to getting the most out of Newscoop. Organised by general tasks, each section will contain a series of step-by-step recipes that help you get your work done quickly and efficiently. Contribute your ideas now.

Newscoop Developer's guides

The Newscoop Template Guide is a technical introduction to templating with Newscoop, including a number of examples and code demonstrations to illustrate the template usage. Newscoop templates are built on Smarty, a template engine for PHP, meaning it’s incredibly easy to develop and deploy and flexibility comes as standard. This guide is an ongoing documentation effort and will always explain the latest additions to the templating engine.

The Newscoop Plugin Guide is your holy book for plugins. Installing Newscoop plugins requires you to make changes in your site's templates to take full advantage of the new features. Every plugin is somewhat unique with some quite complex, and others relatively simple. When a new plugin is released, the changes the it makes to the template language will be made available in this guide.

Airtime for Broadcasters

Airtime is our open radio software for scheduling and remote station management, and the new manual is hot off the press. It guides you through every step of the software's functionality from uploading audio to scheduling shows in the calendar, from installation to import scripts. Actually, you'll realise just how easy Airtime is to use once you've seen the new streamlined manual. It's also got some great diagrams of example set-ups and stations.

Available free online, as an epub, or as a pdf.

Get involved!

Writing new material, editing existing content or translating manuals into new languages; three ways you can boost those karma points and prevent someone, somewhere from reinventing the wheel. We pride ourselves in exceptional documentation and use the innovative Floss Manuals and Booki platforms to produce it. Drop us a line if you want to get involved at [email protected].