We have a few fantastic updates to share, all of which will make MuckRock tools like DocumentCloud even more powerful than they already are. If you value these tools, we encourage you to support DocumentCloud with a donation:
If you’re in a newsroom but not already using DocumentCloud, we’d love to help you get started.
DocumentCloud
The DocumentCloud team has worked hard over the last several months to improve stability, performance and design. We redesigned the top navigation bar which is more aesthetically pleasing and provides more functionality.
Account settings, language settings and the help menu are all a lot cleaner.
And users can see a full organization membership list along with their monthly organizational allowance of AI credits directly in the top navigation bar. Just select the organization to see that info. If you don’t have any AI credits, consider signing up for a premium account so you can access the features. This update removes the membership list from the sidebar, making the sidebar less busy and allowing for easier access.
Clicking on your name brings up the log out menu, the ability to upload documents via email and the option to edit your account settings.
The language drop-down menu is much more clear and we livened it up with flags for each language.
The help menu dropdown also got a redesign with new icons.
In addition to the navigation bar changes, based on some user feedback, the DocumentCloud team has rolled out some changes to the way users access premium Add-Ons. Premium Add-Ons now have their own section in the Add-Ons run menu.
When you do run a premium Add-On, we now show you the AI credit cost per unit, along with your available remaining credit balance, so you know what you’re getting into and can manage your AI credit balance.
DocumentCloud also upgraded to the Svelte 4 framework. This continues our trend of providing a more intuitive and consistent developer experience. Maintaining and upgrading the front end frameworks that power DocumentCloud allows us to provide a better overall user experience.
Python Wrapper Changes
The DocumentCloud API has a Python wrapper, python-documentcloud, which grants you easy access to the vast majority of resources on the DocumentCloud site without having to structure the API calls yourself. For many years, the wrapper has supported both Python 2 and Python 3.
Python 2 has been sunset for nearly four years. With a shrinking user base that still uses Python 2, along with many systems like Github actions no longer supporting Python 2 out of the box, the DocumentCloud team has collectively decided to drop support for Python 2 in future versions of python-documentcloud.
3.8.0 will be the last official version of the wrapper that still supports Python 2.
With the release of version 4.0.0, Python 2 support will be dropped.
In an earlier release notes, we noted that we added automatic testing on commits and pull requests to the python-documentcloud repository. Commits and pull requests to the python-documentcloud repository now also go through code formatting checks with black and pylint. This further improves the quality of code for future releases.
Squarelet
MuckRock’s accounts system, Squarelet, manages access to MuckRock tools like DocumentCloud and our eponymous public records request service, as well as a handful of external resources for newsrooms like Stanford’s Big Local News and their Agenda Watch project.
When reporters first join a newsroom, they often need access to the newsroom’s DocumentCloud account. There’s a “Request to Join” button on Squarelet, but we’ve found that it goes a long way for users to actually connect with an account admin through internal channels. So we’ve added a reminder that connecting with an admin is the best way to get requests processed. Our hope is that this will help more journalists get into DocumentCloud faster while reducing support tickets at our end.
If you aren’t sure who the admins in your newsroom are, you can look that up at https://accounts.muckrock.com/organizations – today is a great day to make sure that you don’t need to update any admins!
