ROSTRA

Technologies for Intelligent News Agency

ROSTRA is a web-based news and content management tool written in PHP. Through the use of templates, it can be customised to fit into existing website designs, or act as a stand-alone website. Article submission is via a simple web form and can be accompanied by a wide variety of media including still images, movies (QuickTime, Windows Media, or FlashBlog), Word and Excel documents and PDF files. Images are resized automatically on the server to save bandwidth. Templates have been created so that ROSTRA can present material in blog formats and/for webcasting. All content is categorised and is fully searcheable. Posting can be done by authorised users or by guests, in which case the system supports message moderation by email. email digests of postings can be created automatically and stories can have permalinks. Certain templates allow authorised users to comment on postings. ROSTRA supports a heirarchical structure allowing sub-ROSTRA to feed into a master ROSTRA. In 2004, ROSTRA was adopted (as 'Making The News') for hundreds of schools across England by the East of England Broadband Consortium.

Kate Dungate

Chris Valentine