lab 1 monarchpress description 1 - old dominion …cpi/old/411/greenf15/images/...lab 1 –...

Lab 1 – MonarchPress Description 1

Lab 1 – MonarchPress Product Description

Robert O’Donnell

CS411

Janet Brunelle

September 20, 2015

Version #2


Table of Contents

1 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 3

2 MONARCHPRESS PRODUCT DESCRIPTION .................................................... 4

2.1 Key Product Features and Capabilities ........................................................ 4

2.2 Major Components (Hardware/Software) .................................................... 6

3 IDENTIFICATION OF CASE STUDY ..................................................................... 8

4 PRODUCT PROTOTYPE DESCRIPTION ............................................................. 8

4.1 Prototype Architectures (Hardware/Software) ............................................ 10

4.2 Prototype Features and Capabilities .......................................................... 11

4.3 Prototype Development Challenges .......................................................... 12

Glossary of Terms........................................................................................................ 14

References .................................................................................................................. 16

List of Figures

Figure 1. Major functional component diagram .............................................................. 6

Figure 2. Prototype major functional component diagram ............................................ 10

List of Tables

Table 1. Feature comparison between full product and prototype .................................. 9


Lab 1 – MonarchPress Product Description

1 INTRODUCTION

Since the introduction of the Internet, Journalism has changed exponentially to

better serve the reader’s needs. The web has changed the way news can be displayed,

changed, and presented to the audience. When the news is printed, it cannot be

updated without waiting for the next release of the paper (Viner 2013). The Internet

allows for constant streams of updates on news which can be viewed from anywhere

(Viner 2013). It allows for interesting ways to demonstrate data with interactive graphs

and creative visualization. The readers can locate exactly what kind of news they want

and can view it through their phones and computers.

With the rise of digital journalism, it creates an issue for low budget news outlets.

The demand for more technical skills increases to provide the data visualizations and

interactive material. The problem occurs with journalists, like university students, when

they do not have all of the technical training in their curriculum to keep up. The training

would add more stress for the students to learn the skills outside of their already

stressful classwork. This makes it more difficult for the low budget news outlets to

compete with highly funded organizations because they cannot afford to hire people

with the all the needed skillsets. In order to solve this issue, the journalist need to spend

more time on their writing and publishing the news to the public instead of the technical

skills needed produce high quality work.

MonarchPress’s purpose is to make it easier for the journalists and news

organizations to focus more on creating quality articles and not on the technical aspects

of producing interesting ways to demonstrate the data. It is a plugin that is added on


top of the current integration with WordPress. It will be free to use to allow the low

budget news outlets to have the ability to compete for more readers and a bigger

audience.

2 PRODUCT DESCRIPTION

MonarchPress is a plugin for the content management system, WordPress. It is

open source to allow for low budget news organization to put money towards other

needed things instead of spending it on employees capable of handling the technical

parts of their articles. It will allow for the publication of dynamic news content since the

news is forever changing. MonarchPress will add more social integration with the

articles to make the readers feel more involved. The editors will be able to use a layout

tool which will allow for more creativity on how the articles are displayed instead of them

all being the exact same.

2.1 Key Product Features and Capabilities

The news is forever changing and certain articles will need to be updated based

on new research. With a newspaper, the information printed is permanent and cannot

be changed until the next issue of the newspaper is published. On the web, the news

organization can actively change the article if new information is released.

MonarchPress is designed to make the process easier and more streamlined. It will

make creating articles and updating them later simple and help the articles grow

dynamically when new information is presented. As more data is developed, this

information can be added to the already published article instead of republishing with a

few changes.


Articles that are more engaging to the users will keep their attention longer while

reading. MonarchPress makes it simpler to create graphs and maps that are interactive

to place inside the article. This will allow the reader to be more entertained while

viewing the content and will more likely stay longer to read more information.

MonarchPress allows for integrating social media into its articles. As the Internet

grows, so does social media. Roughly 71% of adults that use the Internet belong to

some form of social media (Social Networking Fact Sheet, 2013). With the integration of

social media, this can increase the volume of users that will view the article. The

journalist can integrate twitter into their articles by specifying a hashtag for a tweet to be

shown next to the article. This can help get constant updates if the journalist is out

researching the currently article.

Making a layout for an article can require a specific set of skills that journalist

might not have. MonarchPress has the ability to create custom articles by dragging and

dropping content in place in the editor. The article can be created to a particular need or

can be edited later to add a graph or map without needing to edit the code that requires

a specific technical skill.

There are other content management systems that are similar but they do not

cater to everyone. MonarchPress is built specifically for the needs of student news

organizations that may not have a high budget. It is designed to have features that are

only necessary for the news organization using it. MonarchPress is developed to be a

single plugin to prevent security and compatibility issues when dealing with multiple

plugins.


2.2 Major Components (Hardware/Software)

Figure 1 shows the major functional components of MonarchPress.

MonarchPress is a process between the editors, journalist, and guest contributors and

the current deployment method. There are different access restrictions based on the

different users, such as editor and journalist. It provides the layout engine, a data

visualization framework, and the news aggregation algorithm. When the article is

created, it is required to go through MonarchPress process first before it is pushed to

the existing deployment method.

[This space intentionally left blank]


Figure 1. Major functional component diagram


There will need to be a few different interfaces for MonarchPress to be

developed. The drag and drop editing feature needs to display a blank article and have

different elements that can be inserted such as titles, paragraphs, and images. It would

work as a grid to align the elements on the page. There also needs to allow the user to

change the different media elements on the article. The editor would need an interface

to select which hashtags for twitter to be integrated. There needs to be an interface to

select which subject or theme of information the user wants alongside its current article

as references.

Databases will be required to store some of the aspects of the plugin. When the

editor is creating an article using the drag and drop editing, there are stored templates

that can be used. MonarchPress can also store new templates created by the editor. To

increase load time speed, the aggregated feeds will be stored in a local cache. This will

prevent the server from constantly needing to fetch the information.

Algorithms need to be created to make the drag and drop editing work. Things

such as dynamically changing the flow of the text if an image is placed in the middle of

the body of text. The different media elements need to be rendered correctly along with

the article contents. The feed aggregation will also require an algorithm to retrieve the

different news sources and articles with the needed parameters.

WordPress requires a specific stack for it to work. It needs a machine that has

linux installed. Apache needs to be installed to run the website’s language which is

mosly PHP (version 5.2.4 or higher). The database language being used is MySql

(version 5.0 or higher).


The hardware requirements are minimal because the targeted user does not

have much traffic and will be sufficient even with an increase of traffic. It would need to

be able to handle around 8,700 unique monthly visitors. There would only be about

25,000 monthly pageviews (WordPress Hosting).

3 IDENTIFICATION OF CASE STUDY

Mace and Crown is an Old Dominion University student news organization that

has a very low budget. They currently have an issue with having a large digital presence

and would like to improve on it. They are lacking the ability to do use creative data

visualization and interactive elements on their website to help retain reader’s attention.

They want to be able to connect information between global and local events. Create

more content rich articles that can be continuously updated and changed.

MonarchPress can be used on any news organizations webpage as long as they

are using WordPress. It is mainly being develop to help organizations that have a very

limited budget for digital media.

4 PRODUCT PROTOTYPE DESCRIPTION

The prototype of MonarchPress is to show how it will work in the real world. One of

the goals by prototyping is to provide basic functionality of the product to Mace and

Crown. They can then provide feedback and make sure the product is heading in the

direction they would like. Some of the components of the website will have to be

simulated because the live versions will not be available for developing. This may cause

some differences between the real world product and the prototype.


4.1 Prototype Architecture (Hardware/Software)

Figure 2 shows the major functional components of the MonarchPress prototype

and how they interact together. It is similar to Figure 1 but removes the users and adds

a test harness to allow input of mock data. Some of the features such as viewing other

reader’s contact information and tools for collaboration in the full product were

eliminated in the porotype due to the limited amount of time.



Figure 2. Prototype major functional component diagram

The hardware that is required for the prototype will be the same as the full

product to allow for accurate testing. It will need to support 8,700 unique visitors and


about 25,000 monthly pageviews. The prototype will be stress tested for average and

peak loads. A tool such as pylot can be used to simulate the stress on the server.

A simulated version of the Mace and Crown’s website will used to test the

prototype. There will be a fake homepage, login page, article page, and all the plugins

they currently use. There will also have to be mock data in the database such as articles

and users. The prototype will be hosted on an Old Dominion University Computer

Science Department virtual machine. The virtual machine will be using Linux with all of

the WordPress Dependencies which are Apache, MySql, and PHP.

4.2 Prototype Features and Capabilities

The functional goals of the prototype are to demonstrate the high priority features

requested by the Mace and Crown. The layout and editing engine will be fully functional

and provide the ability to build custom articles from scratch or by using an existing

template. The ability to edit an article that is already publish to allow for living

documents and a preview of the article before publishing will be fully functional. The

system to allow users to mark whether they would like to receive notifications if the

article is updated with new information will be functional by sending email’s to the user.



Table 1. Feature comparison between full product and prototype

Interactive and data visualization elements will be partially functional by allowing

the capability of adding already created graphs and maps. The user login will be

functional but missing the ability to save contact information. The twitter feed


aggregation will have some functionality using the twitter Application Program Interface

(API).

By using agile development management, it will be easier to demonstrate

different functionality to the stakeholders, Mace and Crown as they are being

developed. The prototype will have the desired core functionality and be demonstrated

to Mace and Crown for feedback and concerns. By using this management style, it will

be easier to keep the stakeholders involved and make adjustments if needed.

4.3 Prototype Development Challenges

There are a couple of challenges that will be expected while developing the

prototype. One of the main issues will be the limitations of the WordPress API. While

working with the WordPress API, the development will have to work around the limiting

issue as they develop. Another challenge is the lack of expertise the team has in

WordPress or any other web development language that is required to create the

prototype. That can be solved by studying and constantly learning while the prototype is

being developed.

Incompatibility with plugins that the organization already uses can cause issues.

While developing, constant testing of the functionality with the other plugins that are

required will need to be done. By following best practices for WordPress and PHP while

developing will also help reduce compatibility issues.

Another issue that may arise is that testing on the virtual machine is not exactly

like testing on the hosting service that will be used with the full product. The best way to


solve this would be to make the development environment as close as to the production

environment.


GLOSSARY

Admin - a person that has the rights to do anything to the software or database.

Application Program Interface (API) - a set of routines, protocols, and tools for

building software applications. An API expresses a software component in terms

of its operations, inputs, outputs, and underlying types.

Content Aggregation - bringing together specific type of information from multiple

online sources.

Content Management System (CMS) - allows publishing, editing and modifying

content, organizing, deleting as well as maintenance from a central interface

often used to run websites containing blogs, news, and shopping.

Contributor - a person who sends in material to be published, whether it is through

twitter or a researcher. Not, someone that is part of the news organization.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) - a simple mechanism for adding style to Web

documents.

Digital Journalism - a contemporary form of journalism where editorial content is

distributed via the Internet as opposed to publishing via print or broadcast.

Disqus - is a blog comment hosting service for web sites and online communities that

uses a networked platform.

Editor - a person who is in charge of and determines the final content of a text,

particularly a newspaper or magazine.

Javascript - an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to

create interactive effects within web browsers.


Journalist - a person who writes for newspapers or magazines or prepares news to be

broadcast on radio or television.

HTML - Hypertext Markup Language, a standardized system for tagging text files to

achieve font, color, graphic, and hyperlink effects on World Wide Web pages.

Living Document - dynamic document is a document that is continually edited and

updated.

Mace & Crown - A university news organization that is under a tight budget and looking

for a cheaper alternative to their current CMS with more customization and tools.

MySQL - Most widely used open-source RDBMS.

Open Source - denoting software for which the original source code is made freely

available and may be redistributed and modified.

PHP - is a server-side scripting language designed for web development.

Plugin - a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing software

application.

Reader - a person that reads and interacts with the articles posted by the news

organization.

RDBMS - relational database management system.

UI/UX - the process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, ease of

use, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the user and the product.

Whitelisted - a list of people or products viewed with approval.

Wordpress - Most popular open source CMS based on PHP and MySQL.


REFERENCES

Social Networking Fact Sheet. (2013, December 27). Retrieved September 20, 2015,

from

http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fact-sheet/

Viner, K. (2013, October 9). The rise of the reader: Journalism in the age of the open

web.

Retrieved September 21, 2015, from

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/09/the-rise-of-the-reader-

katharine-viner-an-smith-lecture

WordPress® hosting without the hassle | GoDaddy Pro. (n.d.). Retrieved September 21,

2015,

from https://www.godaddy.com/pro/managed-wordpress-hosting

http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fact-sheet/

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/09/the-rise-of-the-reader-katharine-viner-an-smith-lecture

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/09/the-rise-of-the-reader-katharine-viner-an-smith-lecture

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