PublicSquare makes publishing easy. Save time on the mechanics, and focus your resources on the stories, the people, and building your community. Your audience is your greatest asset. PublicSquare provides the platform to let them contribute and participate.
PublicSquare is great for creating communities of passionate readers:
- Webzines
- Community newspapers
- Citizen journalism
- Hobbiests
- Professional societies
- Trade magazines
- School papers
- Company magazines
- ...and so much more
Interested? Sign up for a free accountWhy PublicSquare?
Community Manages Itself
People earn reputation points based on the feedback about their contributions, making it easy for you to identify potential new editors. Sort people based on reputation, look at their contributions, and find your next superstar.
The community votes for good and bad comments, and can flag offensive comments and spam, making it easier for you to stay on top of your site. Readers also can suggest insightful comments, which become story ideas.
Incoming story ideas are collected, commented, and voted on by other readers, and move seamlessly to production when ready. Quickly identify the most requested or most controversial ideas. No more struggling to manage incoming story ideas by email.
Simplify Your Workflow
Simple, easy-to-use tools lets editors and publishers know at a glance what's going on. Authors and editors just write a message, and choose the color that best represents progress: green, yellow, or red.
Keep up with the people who are editing and writing stories in the current pipeline. You can see when they last logged in and what they're working, so you can assess the workload.
Messages are left on the individual story pages, allowing chief editors to track issues, chime in and make hand-offs easier. The full history of the project lives on, letting new contributors learn fr`om the past.
The Features You Need
Track which published stories are getting your readers' attention. You can see how many views and how many comments each story is receiving in how many days. You'll know when you've struck a chord.
Publish using your own domain name to build your brand and identity.
Make your own design. Show off your style. With the easy-to-use and powerful templating language Liquid, you can make the design of your site completely your own.
Speaking of Features...
PublicSquare Features
- Asset management
- Asset keywording
- Support for many formats: gifs, audio, video and more
- Built in SEO practices
- Email notifications
- Comments
- Reputation system
- User biographies
- Multiple authors
- RSS practically everything
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
- Where can I see it running?
- Take a look at web design magazine Boxes and Arrows, which has been running PublicSquare since December 2005.
- Do I need to install anything?
- Nope, no need to install anything. Just sign up, and you're ready to go. PublicSquare is hosted by us, so you don't have to worry about installation, upgrades, patches, and system administration. It is used entirely through any modern web browser.
- How much does it cost?
- There's a free plan which you can use forever. Other plans cost from $12/month upwards.
- Can I install it on my own servers?
- PublicSquare is a hosted application. We do not have any plans to offer a version for installation on your own servers.
- Can I change the design of my publication?
- For sure. You can choose between the built-in themes, or you can design your own using the easy-to-use templating language Liquid. See the documentation for more info.
- Can I use it for offline publishing as well?
- Yes, you can still use PublicSquare to manage the process of putting together an issue of your print magazine. It's not something we have built in explicit support for, but if you're looking to do this, please do get in touch.
- What happens if I get slashdotted or duggscaped?
- At this price point, we can't make any guarantees about what will happen. But we are committed to continuously building out our server infrastructure to ensure that we can handle the load should your site get duggscaped or experience other spikes in traffic. Because of the aggregated nature, it's easier for us to maintain the spare capacity to handle diggscaping and share the cost among all our customers, than it would be for most sites to be dimensioned to handle this individually.
- Can I get my data back out?
- Absolutely! We do not intend to hold your data hostage. We're working on an API that will let you get access to all the relevant portions of your data using a simple XML/REST interface. We haven't quite finished it yet, but if you want to cancel or just want your data out in the meantime, just let us know and we'll be happy to assist you.
- Can I import data from other platforms into PublicSquare?
- Not quite yet, unfortunately. It will be possible to get data in via an easy-to-use API that we're adding to PublicSquare, and we will probably be building a few importers ourselves. And if we don't, it will be open to anyone to write one using our API.
Interested? Sign up for a free accountAbout PublicSquareTM
PublicSquare was created out of the need for a multi-contributor publishing environment. It is the first platform of its type, and is rapidly gaining acceptance by the publishing, social media and journalism communities.
PublicSquare is a product of Cucina Media, the groundbreaking online publishing network that is changing the face of community media.
Cucina Media is a privately funded corporation founded by Christina Wodtke. To learn more about investment opportunities for Cucina Media please email Christina @ cucinamedia.com.