OPEN SOURCE INTERNET PUBLISHING SOFTWARE FOR NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES AND OTHER PERIODICALS

SITE NAVIGATION

GENERAL:

· home
· project goals
· mailing list / IRC
· how to help
· props in action
· links

FOR END USERS:

· introduction to templates and tags
· template tag reference

FOR DEVELOPERS

· accessing CVS
· submitting patches
· sourceforge project page


SourceForge Logo

ABOUT PROPS

PROPS is an open, extensible Internet publishing system designed specifically for periodicals such as newspapers and magazines who want to publish online, either exclusively or as an extension of their print publication. PROPS is written entirely in PHP using a MySQL database backend, and is free software released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

 

WHAT'S NEW

26 September 2008 - The PROPS project is still very much alive and kicking. Don't be fooled by the lack of updates on this page - most activity is on the mailing list. PROPS 0.8 is out, and is a major improvement over 0.7. It's faster, and has cleaner code and more features. It also now has support for localization, and has already been translated into several languages. Download PROPS 0.8 here.

24 October 2005 - PROPS 0.7 final release is out. This fixes a few significant issues in 0.7 RC2, including a bug with story dates and admin photo searches. See the CHANGELOG for details.

12 August 2005 - PROPS 0.7 Release Candidate 2 is out. This fixes a few minor issues in 0.7 RC1. Hopefully this moves us closer to a final 0.7 release. Please report bugs, quirks, etc. Major new features (GD support, etc.) will have to wait until after 0.7 is out.

12 July 2005 - PROPS 0.7 Release Candidate 1 has been released. This contains many changes from the 0.6 series and as such should be approached cautiously. Make backups of your files and database before attempting an upgrade, and test thoroughly before deploying in a production environment. See CHANGELOG.txt or the mailing list for a list of changes.

 

FEATURES

PROPS is currently undergoing heavy development and is not yet feature-complete. Here is a list of major features we are aiming to deliver in the final 1.0 release:

  • Easy to install
  • Well-documented, robust API allowing third party developers to create 'plug-ins' to extend base functionality
  • Delivery of content to multiple target platforms (HTML, XML/XSL, WAP/WML, text, etc)
  • Readers may format a story for printing, or email to a friend
  • Pages are presented as static URLs so that 'spider' type search engines may crawl and index them
  • Strict separation of design and content - designers control site look and feel by developing templates using standard site editing tools such as Dreamweaver, GoLive, BBEdit, etc., while editors manage site content via a web interface
  • Permissions-based multiuser site management screens allow a PROPS site to be maintained by a distributed team of reporters and editors
  • Will support the XML-based News Industry Text Format
  • Will speak various XML dialects for both import and export, allowing syndication in both directions, and enabling PROPS sites to participate in distributed news networks
  • Is targeted at mid-sized publishers serving fewer than one million page views daily, however will be architected to scale through deployment of multiple front-end web servers, separate image servers, etc.

[ read more ]

 

SCREENSHOTS

Sections Management

Admin story search results

Viewing a story


Setting admin account privileges

Assigning photos to a story

Paid archives report

 

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Reference platform for development is Linux 2.4 with Apache 1.3.x or 2.0, MySQL 3.23 or 4.x, and PHP 4.1 or higher. PHP3 will not be supported. We intend to make sure PROPS will run on other Unix platforms. NT/W2K/IIS support is dependent on whether we get requests for that, and more important, patches and development help.

 

DOWNLOADING THE SOFTWARE

The latest version of PROPS is 0.8, which was released on 24 April, 2008.

Download here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=29581&package_id=21534&release_id=594607