Managing News Beta 7 just rolled out the door. In this release, we’ve added inline tagging to allow for quickly sorting news into multiple Channels at the same time and improved the customization workflow for maps. Under the hood, we switched parsers and have done a series of security upgrades.

Inline tagging on Managing news: 1) tags on news 2) click to edit 3) add a new tag.

Push news into Channels faster

Managing News ships with a feature called “Channels”. Users can sift through news, selectively add news items to one or more Channels, and allow others to subscribe to Channels or print them as reports.

Users frequently noted that the UI for Channels could be improved, as did Andrew Turner and Chris Blow from the Swift River project in a recent meeting. So we hammered out how organizing news in Channels should work. It should be quick, it should allow for sorting into multiple Channels at once, and it should allow for clustering news before needing to decide whether and how to organize it in Channels.

Watch the screencast to see the result:

Customizing your map got easier

Managing News users like 29-95 in Houston have shown that it was already possible, but we just made it easier to customize maps on Managing News. This is thanks to the new release of Open Layers 2.0 for Drupal, which helps configure map constraints within an interactive map. Will White will talk more about this in a screencast showing how to customize locations and maps in Managing News, due out in a few days.

We switched parsers

While incompatibilities between SimplePie and Google News persist, we switched the default to the syndication parser that has shipped with Managing News since its first release. This is not a final decision, and we’re curious to hear about your experiences with it.

Installing and upgrading

Installing Managing News is simple. Download it from ManagingNews.com, unpack it on your web server, configure a database, and run the interactive install procedure. To upgrade an existing version, check out the upgrade notes that explain the process step-by-step.

What’s next?

One factor that strongly influences the direction of Managing News is the news tracking and data aggregation challenges that our clients face. Another is feature requests and bug reports in the issue queue.

To give the community of Managing News users a better idea of where we are headed, we compiled a roadmap of the features and changes to come. None of these items are prioritized, but the roadmap gives an accurate picture of what we think an ideal future version of Managing News will be. This future picture is of course subject to change as we move through iterations and as we learn more about how news tracking works best.

We were able to push this beta release forward in the last couple weeks thanks to our partnership with Teachers Without Borders, who is sponsoring certain parts of Managing News development – particularly the new Channels improvements and the parser switch. We are excited to continue working with Brandon Waterman at TWB over the next 6 weeks as we push on a beta 8 release with even more of the features from the roadmap.