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Common News Requirements

System

It seems that most CMS-managed sites end up with a "news" or "press release" facility. I know the way I like News to work both in the CMS and on the live sites, but I'm wondering what other people have done for News that I haven't considered. I'm not really interested in the technical implementation, just the ideas that were considered, rejected and/or implemented, what worked and what didn't work, what you would do differently next time, etc. At the very least I need to support syndication (deployment by email newsletter and to multiple servers such as Intranet and multiple Internets), sorting, filtering (by date) and aggregation, but what else should I be thinking about, even if the requirement is not currently defined?

Thanks,

-John

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Dwayne

Well, by "aggregation" I'm assuming you're referring to grouping news articles into categories. One thing that I've done at some of my clients is to provide a facility to all articles to be "promoted" from these category indexes up to a higher level index. Sort of a "featured story" kind of thing, where, under the control of a site administrator, an article will be included not just in the category index, but also on a news "home page" and/or the site home page.

You probably also want to be thinking about expiration and/or archiving of old articles.

Good discussion topic. I'm looking forward to hearing what other people suggest.

--

Current project: TS 5.5.2/6.1 W2K

Migrateduser

Actually, I probably should have said archiving instead of aggregation, but I guess in some ways they're the same thing. We don't have news categories defined at this point - only syndication targets. I will mention categories and see if there is any need, but this also sounds like something we could bolt on pretty easily later.

Thanks,

-John

Adam Stoller

Are you talking about dynamic news feeds - or static page generation culling information from other existing static content?

I haven't really spent much time doing either - but the former would probably be more likely to exist on the production-side of things and less likely to exist within CMS (unless you're versioning the live feed data).

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

Migrateduser

Even if we had syndicated feeds coming in, all news data needs to flow through the CMS for versioning, edit and approval.

The news items are pretty distinct - we wouldn't be repurposing existing non-news content (although a news record may link to any other content).

BTW, I think static pages are a thing of the past - this data will all be retrieved dynamically.

Thanks,

-John

Migrateduser

Didn't get much feedback on this on this or other forums - just trying to bring it to the top again.

It seems that most CMS-managed sites end up with a "news" or "press release" facility. I know the way I like news to work both in the CMS and on the live sites, but I'm wondering what other people have done for news that I haven't considered. I'm not really interested in the technical implementation, just the ideas that were considered, rejected and/or implemented, what worked and what didn't work, what you would do differently next time, etc. At the very least I need to support syndication (deployment by email newsletter and to multiple servers such as Intranet and multiple Internets), sorting, filtering (by date) and aggregation, but what else should I be thinking about, even if the requirement is not currently defined?

Jeremy

Hi John,

One project I worked on had a syndicated feed coming in. The feeds would automatically be placed in a workarea directory. A script would then run every 20min or so checking for any new feeds. It would move the new feeds to another directory. It would then create a DCR from the Feed and kick off a workflow with that DCR which would go through the whole approval process and then deploy to a database where it could be pulled onto the live site.
If I recall correctly there would only be a certain number of news stories displayed and then a link to the archive where articles are displayed for an amount of time.

Its been a while since then so can't remember the details too well now.

HTH

Jeremy

Gregg Faus

As far as ideas go you may consider using your news content in a subscription system. It is easy to summarize your content and integrate into a custom solution or 3rd party product.

You may also consider RSS if your site users would use it.

Technically, there are a few things I've learned from past experiences with larger news utility implementations:
1) If you are dynamically organizing/grouping articles you should include an archiving mechanism so that old content is not parsed. Generation time can balloon over time.

2) Use a master file (e.g. an xml file) that contains all the common info you will need to build out "index type" pages. For instance, I have a file which I iterate through (based on a date field, grouped by month) to build an index to individual articles. It's also used to build a "latest articles section" in an include file, an admin utility to manage articles, etc...

3) It is helpful to include an active/inactive option in your DCT

4) Use separate tpls for each page that is generated