Project Proposal:

Transforming the e-Concordiensis

Edward Maas

Senior Capstone Design Project

http://ed.maas-nyc.com/csc197/

Advisor: Professor Cass

Presented To:

Professor Hemmendinger

June 9^th, 2004

Table of Contents

Introduction........................................................................................................................... 3

About the Concordiensis................................................................................................... 3

Project Design....................................................................................................................... 4

Conclusion............................................................................................................................ 6

Introduction

The purpose of this project will be to investigate and implement two primary technologies: a content management system and a portal front-end. It is my hope that through my research and programming, I will gain a better understanding of how these systems work and how one can create useful applications using them. In addition, I plan to focus on creating a valuable solution for my client, the Union College Concordiensis.

About the Concordiensis

The Concordiensis is a student publication, financially supported in part by the Union College Student Forum and is published eight times a semester. It has a staff of about nine editors with approximately fifteen writers and photographers. Each week of publication, writers submit stories by Sunday evening. Editors then work to produce edited articles, photos, and an appealing layout before Wednesday evening. The paper is sent Wednesday night to the press and printed copies arrive on Thursday morning. On Thursday and Friday, the webmasters assemble the printed paper into an electronic copy using Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). This process can be easily seen in figure 1 below.

Though, PDF is a quick means to create an electronic copy of the paper, it does not allow an internet reader to browse and read articles in a comfortable manner. In addition, flexibility is lost because the PDF files are large, cannot be searched, do not use hypertext to link related ideas, and ultimately are slow for a webmaster to update.

One of my primary goals is to create an overall web application that will improve many of the issues identified above. I would like to see a Concordiensis website that could be read quickly by senior citizens with slow Internet connections and updated by my mother, a woman with little technical proficiency. I propose to do this using two core technologies: a content management system and a web portal. The project in summary will be to develop a custom application around these two core technologies.

Project Design

The finished product for the Concordiensis will have several different elements. First, it should employee a content management tool which will be used to organize and store articles, images, and other information for display to the public. I plan to use an existing open source content management tool for this task. There are three main justifications for the tool being open source. The first is that I intend to learn about how content management systems perform the tasks that they do. This can best be accomplished by access to fully documented source code. Second, commercial content management products can cost upwards of $100,000 and that amount of money is significantly beyond my budget for the project. Lastly, I want to have the ability to easily tailor and mold the content manager for the Concordiensis. Many of the open source products are missing certain features and enhancing the selected content management tool is something that I foresee doing to create a more complete solution for my client.

The second aspect of my project is the creation of a portal to display the information stored in the content management system. The portal will be the front-end that all visitors will see and interact with. Therefore, the design must be simple and easy to use. I will be modeling after similar portals that display news such as The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com), CNN (http://www.cnn.com), and News.com (http://news.com/). Articles will no longer be displayed exactly as they were in the printed form, but rather in an easier to read hypertext format. Additionally, the new medium would allow for several new features such as the ability to view back issues and to search for articles.

In creating this multi-tiered system, there are several non-functional requirements which are important to the design. Speed is a primary concern since it will be difficult at first to predict the number of people that will view the site. The portal and content management system must work together in an efficient manner such that users are unaware of the complex backend. In essence, the browsing experience must not be impaired by the new complex system of organization. Additionally, the system will require a server. I am considering using the computer science department server, scoter or virtual union. Regardless, development will be limited by the amount of space that is available on that server. Hence, while developing the system, a limited amount of articles and pictures will be able to be added to the system. It is my hope that after adoption, the Concordiensis will look to move the system to a server that has sufficient capacity for their needs.

In any software development project there are also risks. One risk and challenge posed by this system involves the data exchange between the new electronic system and the Concordiensis’s current process. It is my ultimate goal to use a tool that will extract the articles from the Concordiensis’s layout program, Quark Xpress. This would eliminate the need for an editor to enter articles by hand into the system. The challenge is that the current version of Quark being used by the paper does not have the capability to handle this type of export. Over the summer, I will be evaluating several plug-ins and third party tools that might help make this desired procedure become realty.

Finally, it is my priority to focus first on the design and features of the content management system. I will be devoting time in the beginning of the project to research of various different existing content management systems in order to minimize problems later in the project. After deciding on the content management system and developing an importing process, I intend to design (using proper software engineering techniques) the portal system. This component will mostly be written from scratch and will involve a considerable amount of programming. I hope to reserve at least five weeks at the end of winter term for bug fixing and testing to insure that the system works as planned.

Conclusion

Despite potential risks, challenges, and a lack of funding, this project not only interests me, but has the potential to be a useful system for the Union College Community. The key to a successful completion and launch of this project will involve deadlines and strict time management. Figure 2 graphically displays how I intend to divide my time such that I can complete the project on time and full featured.

Figure 2 – Gantt Chat displaying time allocation by activity.

In closing, I look forward to a busy summer of research and preparation such that I can begin developing my design first thing in the fall.