Introduction

Live Center is a liveblogging application based on the Escenic Content Engine. It consists of the the Live Center webapp plus supporting extensions to the Content Engine. The Live Center app provides bloggers, journalists and editors with a purpose-built, streamlined liveblogging platform. Since it is a browser-based app, all you need to use it is a web-capable device – anything from a laptop down to a smartphone – and a network connection.

Live Center is designed to support continuous news coverage of events. An event can be a football match, a royal wedding, a disaster, an election, a conference – something that is of limited duration and of great interest to your public. An event is represented in Live Center by a special type of content item, also called Event. An Event content item consists of a reverse-chronological series of entries containing updates about the event.

An event is published as a self-updating story: whenever a new entry is added to the event and published, it is effectively pushed to all readers currently viewing the event; they do not need to actively refresh the story. Since events are published in reverse-chronological order, the new entry appears at the top of the event page.

Entries can contain pretty much anything: text, images, links, media clips, tweets and so on, and can come from a variety of sources:

  • Any Live Center webapp user working on the event

  • Agency feeds

  • Social platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and YouTube

The exact structure of an entry can vary from event to event, and you can configure your own entry types. A football entry, for example, could have an "incident" field that can be set to "goal", "penalty", "offside" and so on. An entry designed for an election event might have a "constituency" field for specifying where the report is coming from.

Once Live Center is installed and configured, it is very easy to use. Events are created and published using Content Studio, in exactly the same way as other content items.