Campsite offers plug-and-play freedom of the press

The non-profit Media Development Loan Fund (MDLF) released a major upgrade to its online journalism content management system (CMS) Campsite last week. Campsite 3.2 brings a flexible new plugin system and several improvements to search, templating, and content editing. MDLF describes Campsite as a CMS tailor-made for newspaper publishers — many of whom cannot afford expensive commercial products or the IT support required to heavily customize general-purpose CMS packages. Many of MDLF's target organizations are independent media in countries in transition, but the system is used in newsrooms all over the globe.

Campsite is deployed by more than 70 publications, many in Central and Eastern Europe near MDLF's Center for Advanced Media in Prague (CAMP), the office from which Campsite takes its name. But the software is also popular in Latin America, such as at El Periodico in Guatemala City, Guatemala.

MDLF's mission is to support independent journalists and media organizations, so that they are "strong enough to hold governments to account, expose corruption and drive systemic change." Founded in 1996, it provides funding to independent media in 23 countries, made possible through private donations and public grants. MDLF describes tools as the key investments for independent media, including printing presses, radio and television transmitters, and software. Campsite and the other CAMP projects grew out of MDLF's need to provide low-cost, open source software for new media outlets.

The feature set caters to the needs of professional news publications, which CAMP's Head of Research and Development Douglas Arellanes described as an "organic" relationship. "Campsite has been around since 2000, and nearly all of its features have come on the basis of real-world implementations."

Arellanes says journalists and editors on deadlines have better things to do than worry about CMS management, and that is the key difference that sets Campsite apart. He personally likes Wordpress and has great respect for the project, noting that:

Campsite's back-end allows an organization to replicate the newspaper workflow: authors can create and edit stories, submitting them to the editors when ready; editors can alter them, schedule them to run at predetermines times, change their visibility, move them between sections, and ultimately approve their publication. The system also handles administrative tasks like managing subscriptions, tracking article views, and moderating reader comments. A single back-end can also run multiple publications with different rules, schedules, layouts, and subscription lists and policies.

It can handle paid or unpaid subscriptions, supports embedded multimedia in articles, can integrate with the Phorum web forum package, and is multilingual from the ground up. The interface is available in 14 languages, and every individual article can be translated, whether as a one-off special, side-by-side in a single publication, or with entire sections or publications in separate languages.

Lead developer Mugur Rus said Campsite takes security very seriously. The administration interface can run over SSL and uses fine-grained role based privileges on all accounts. The system also uses CAPTCHA for comment forms, logs all events, and can use email notification to alert system administrators. Rus says Campsite itself has only been cracked once, and that it uses the standard security features of its free software based platform.

A peek at 3.2

Campsite is written in PHP and is designed to run on Apache servers using MySQL. The manual cites Apache 2.0.x, PHP 5.0, and MySQL 5.0 as the minimum version dependencies, and requires ImageMagick to handle graphics. In addition, you must run PHP as an Apache module, not as CGI, and there is a short list of required PHP directives to set up in the installation's php.ini file. Campsite runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and Mac OS X servers. No current Linux distributions are known to include Campsite, although from time to time users have shared their own home-brewed packages.

New in version 3.2 are improvements to search functionality, content editing, and site templating. The search improvements include an "advanced" search mode and increased support for non-ASCII languages that were problematic in earlier revisions. The story editor now uses the WYSIWYG TinyMCE component, with which administrators can customize the available markup features by privilege level. The Smarty-based templating system now supports functions, and developers have begun migrating the Campsite administration interface to Yahoo's open source AJAX interface library YUI.

The most significant feature is the debut of a plugin architecture that can extend the functionality of a publication but remain integrated with the core Campsite story content. For example, one of the three default plugins in Campsite 3.2 is a blogging module. Arellanes observed that most newspaper sites are just beginning to implement staff blogs, and that when they do they are typically stand-alone deployments of existing blog systems that sit isolated from the rest of the publication. Using Campsite's blog plugin, however, content is accessible via the same topic tags and search, whether it is a news article or a blog post.

The other two default plugins implement reader polls and a "live" interview system — in which readers can ask questions, an administrator can approve or reject them. The interviewee can then respond to them and have the answers posted automatically.

3.2 also uses a simpler installation process, inspired by Wordpress's five-minute install experience. Users now need only to expand the tar archive of the latest Campsite build, put the site contents into the folder they desire on their Web host, and follow the step-by-step setup process through the Web installer.

Moving forward

Arellanes said to expect a quick turnaround for the next stable release of Campsite, focusing on cache performance and overall speedups, and implementing a content API that will permit Campsite sites to make their story content available to outside users for aggregation or content mashups.

He also hopes to see more development from third-party coders on plugins using the new plugin API. "The open source model, as it concerns Campsite, has meant that we're really growing in terms of the number of features that are being contributed from non-core developers. We expect this trend to really pick up now that we've got a plugin architecture to work with."

The press release for Campsite 3.2 notes that independent media in developing countries have long operated on limited funds that preclude the expensive CMS solutions preferred by other organizations — the very situation that drives MDLF's software projects. But it also points out that newspapers in the "developed" world are facing a financial crisis of their own. Consequently, an open source CMS like Campsite makes more sense than ever.