Troubadour CMS 2009-10-17 13:04 GMT

Troubadour is free open source content management system (CMS) originally built for multi-user podcast (audio and video) and creating multimedia presentations in educational environment. Since of version 0.7 Troubadour manages ordinary websites and blogs as well. It is programmed with PHP 5 and the databases are XML-driven - no separate database installation (eg. MySQL) is needed.

Details

Main features

Dedicated in delivering audio files via web browser interface or via podcast feeds. Every web interface view corresponds to an identical podcast feed, so in addition to main feed you have automatically separate feeds for every organization, keyword, category or author.

You can also create multimedia presentations by combining audio and slides.

• easy installation
• editable, standards compliant default theme
• multiple user accounts (as of 0.7 security is not tested for large portals!)
• organization hierarchy
• tagging by keywords
• audio and video player for compatible file types (mp3, flv, h.264/mpeg-4, ogg)
• create multimedia presentations by combining audio with slides
• iTunes categories or custom categories to organize pages in hierarchy
• comments
• link database
• localization: language and time settings, translatable
• podcast feeds with RSS 2.0 and iTunes namespaces
• localization: language and time settings, translatable
• administration via web interface
• PHP 5, XML databases
• open source (GPL v3)

Download | Support

Additional information

Background and future plans

I started developing Troubadour as a part of podcast project for my work at University of Helsinki, from Summer 2008 to Fall 2009. Now I'm continuing the development in my free time, and it's future is secured since I'm moving all my web site projects on this engine. The future hopes includes developing it into a full flavored and flexible CMS with rich multimedia features. However, I can't say anything about speed of the progress - I will add new features when I need them, and also when/if someone hires me to do something in it. Actually much is done already, the main question is finishing the features and making some more up-to-date.

Version history

• 2010-01-15 - 0.7.1 Minor bug fixes.
• 2009-12-28 - 0.7 Pages, comments/discussion, link database
• 2009-10-13 - 0.6.5 Several minor fixes.
• 2009-09-04 - 0.6.4 Partial caching. Updated Troubadour Player 0.3 (alternative slides).
• 2009-07-27 - 0.6.3 Draft before publishing.
• 2009-07-23 - 0.6.2 Embedded player for FLV and H.264/MPEG-4 video files.
• 2009-07-20 - 0.6.1 Edit presentations.
• 2009-06-25 - 0.6 Create multimedia presentations.
• 2009-02-11 - 0.5.3 Option for direct file uploads.
• 2009-02-07 - 0.5.2 Version update check.
• 2009-02-05 - 0.5.1 Bug fixes, announcements feed to Dashboard.
• 2009-02-02 - 0.5 Initial release: group podcasting.

Credits

These open source programs are included or partially adapted in the program.

WordPress Audio Player (MIT)

Standalone version used as the mp3-player.

TinyMCE (LGPLv2.1)

Rich text / HTML editor for form fields.

getID3() (GPLv2)

PHP library for extracting and writing ID3 tags.