TDI | Outsourcing | Edinburgh: Web Development. Newspaper website.

Web Development. Newspaper website.
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Marat Bekmetov on 05 February, 2009 11:52:00
 
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.