Content & Distribution

Calling all Composer Pro Users! We are excited to improve your schedule and playlist experience by upgrading your station to Composer 2 now. 

We are pleased to announce the creation of a developer-focused listserv for all things NPR API.

On this listserv, your technical staff can:

The following updates were made to Core Publisher this week:

Station Analytics System

Core Publisher stations are now ready to move over to SAS tracking. We will be moving stations to SAS tracking over the next few days. Along with this comes some additional data in Google Analytics, namely author, tag, and keyword popularity. And much more to come. Stay tuned.

We will not be holding our bi-weekly sprint review webinar this afternoon.

And an update on recent work, which will go live the evening of Wednesday, May 8.

We are very excited to share that Composer 2 is now available to stations!

New and Improved Features in Composer 2

We at Digital Services are happy to announce that V1.3 of our WordPress plugin is now available for your use.  This latest version of the plugin will support the WordPress feature that allows administrators for a multi-site installation to install plugins from one network admin screen and have the plugin available for all of the sites supported by their single WordPress installation.  

V1.3 of this plugin is available under the main/master branch at https://github.com/npr/WP-DS-NPR-API

The following updates were made to Core Publisher this week:

Audio Fix

We have expanded the group of stations testing a fix to improve the processing of audio in posts. The fix is now live on Michigan Radio, State of Opportunity, WWNO, WBFO, WRTI, KBIA, and KCUR (Thank You!)

Thanks to the real-world testing by these stations we uncovered and fixed a defect in the update causing audio to break on aggregation pages such as category, program and topic pages.

We will not be holding our bi-weekly sprint review webinar this afternoon. All fixes and features will be going live via code push this evening.

Audio in Posts Fix

Testing has gone very well. We will be rolling this new process out (how we push audio to servers) to an additional subset of stations this week before we deploy it across all stations.

Mobile Slideshows

Slideshows on post pages will now show up on mobile sites.

Defect Addressed:

We will not be holding our bi-weekly sprint review webinar this afternoon. All fixes and features will be going live via hotfixes over the next few days. In addition, some of the work covered in this sprint does not require a code change.

Defects Addressed:

This week and next the following updates are being made to the Core Publisher system through a series of hot fixes versus a large code push:

Twitter Cards

We have begun "white-listing" sites for inclusion in the Twitter Card program, fro the Twitter app and site. The Twitter Card program provides a preview of the full site on Twitter when a URL is shared in a tweet.

Core Publisher is an editorially-focused content management system that puts your news and audio at the forefront of your site, and designed to support diverse promotional, membership and underwriting needs. Designed specifically for public radio, it includes a flexible, responsive presentation template with native integration with the NPR Story API enabling content syndication across the public radio digital ecosystem. 

We will not be holding our bi-weekly sprint review webinar this afternoon. The past sprint focused on continuing our work to increase and improve the regression tests we execute. These tests run in the background all the time, and are meant to alert us to any unexpected changes to existing functionality when updates and enhancements are added to Core Publisher.

If you haven't seen our recent webinar with Scott Finn, News Director from WUSF in Tampa, you should. Scott goes into some fantastic detail about how he achieved a six-fold traffic increase on their site through creative online coverage of the RNC.

At Digital Services we don't often point out the nice things people sometimes say about us, but this time we got it on tape, so I'm going to set aside convention and share.

This evening we will be pushing our latest feature on Core Pub, the updated Post Form. I will be adding FAQs here over the next few days. In the meantime I wanted to make sure every newsroom had the salient information they need to work with the new form.

Please to refer to and distribute these slides as needed, which contain the following information: 

• How do I make a slideshow? 
• Which audio will go into my podcast? 
• How do I edit audio I added the "old way"?

And as always, please contact us with any additional questions, comments, or feedback. We are all ears.