Web Development. Newspaper website.

This is an example of newspaper website, a project we participated back in 2007-2008. It features a complex integration of various sub-systems, such as: Content Management System, membership subscription, banner management system (both - internal and external (via javascript)), stock-market data feed (via XML transformation), several bespoke customisations of partner plug-in microsites.

The content management system allows for the staff at the newspaper to edit the site themselves, e-mail subscribers and manage headlines.

Bringing a printed periodical publication (e.g. newspaper) online is not a straight forward business. It involved many stakeholders that have to be pleased and dealt with. A biggest challenge was communications with third-party content providers (micro-site partners) which layout and design should be matched or nearly matched with the proposed design. Although the necessary 'media pack' (specification) was issued still ... dealing with various third-party content providers that run on different platforms and using different technologies was not easy.

Initially the site had a public forum built-in, but shortly after the launch it proved to be difficult to maintain (moderate) it - as it required some valuable time to be spent reviewing postages and getting rid of all those unwanted adverts and dodgy messages slipping through (even though an automatic filters were in place!), so the Forum had to be disabled to allow the Web Editor concentrate on his main duties.  Part of the system was a mechanism that exports articles from Quark straight to public website. 

Summary features:

• Content management system for adding/managing news and articles.
• Internal banner management system.
• Quark > XML > MySQL transformation for production news and articles.
• News content feed-in with automatic transformation and placement of articles into relevant categories (these still can be managed and edited through the contetn management system).
• Stock market data feed-in and transformation.
• Different CSS templates per category.
• External banner feed-in.
• Third-party content integration (micro-sites).
• Protected content (archived news and articles are accessible only to registered users).
• Single login mechanism, where registered readers are automatically recognised and authored on partner micro-sites.