Dear Newsgrape Community,

It is time for a short development update, which we're publishing weekly until the relaunch. 

We have now been working on the rewrite of Newsgrape for over three months and it is finally just about three weeks until the launch of Newsgrape 2, the Open Beta. And don't forget that you can literally watch the development happen!  

The main topics of the past week were: 

Servers

Due to the recent events in AWS (Amazon Web Services), when a number of major companies have lost sensitive data, or have been no longer available for quite some time, we have decided against moving Newsgrape entirely into the cloud. Instead Newsgrape operates with a hybrid system, which stores media files (like images etc) in the cloud using S3, whilst all critical database functions remain in freshly upgraded Hetzner servers. 

Article Creation

The article creation section is almost complete. As a recent add-on, it is now possible to set "Creative Commons" and licenses individually for each article.  

Moreover, it is now much easier to save drafts, to edit at a different time on. Another box allows you to set references for your article, to give credit to your sources. 

It is also worth noting that it is now possible to combine multiple articles and photo-spreads into so-called Stories. You can now, for example, link articles into complex reports, or combine short stories into volumes of narratives, and much more.

Staff

Finally, I would like to mention a few recent developments in our team: The appointment of Bernhard as chief programmer has already happened a few weeks ago. The core development team is set up out of Conrad, Louis and Bernard, with support of Sean and Gabor. They are also receiving additional support from Florian, a young student who is taking responsibility for the messaging. 

Something you might find interesting is also that we finally got to through the first of the rewards and we've now sent out personal messages to all those who directly helped to launch the Pre-Beta phase with Kickstarter.com. 

Most have probably already arrived, others are likely still on their long journey around the world, all the way to Dubai, Bermuda or Rio de Janeiro. The postman was nearly unable to cope with all the different places.. and my hand (since I'm not really used to hand writing anymore) is still very quite cramped =)

I'd like to wish you all a nice afternoon and a lot of fun using Newsgrape!

best wishes,

Leo

p.s.: For more updates, follow Newsgrape on Twitter or join the Facebook page!