KSU News Portal: A Case Study

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1 KSU News Portal: A Case Study Yousef Al-Ohali College of Computer & Information Sciences King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia yousef@ccis.edu.sa Abdul Aziz Al-Oraij, Basit Shahzad Deanship of E-Transactions & Communication King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia oraij@ksu.edu.sa, basit.shahzad@gmail.com Abstract--Information, now days, is a need instead of an option. The News Portal of King Saud University is an effort to provide information about the current happenings in the university nationally and internationally. The news portal has emerged as a reliable way of sharing and publicizing information across the world. The trust level for the news portal has increased with passage of time and the number of visitors visiting this site has also increased overwhelmingly. This research is focused to discuss the tools, technologies and practices used to implement this success story. Keywords: KSU News, News portal, KSU portal department, WordPress news portal. I. INTRODUCTION King Saud University, being the oldest and largest in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, was established 1953 to provide quality education to the youth of this holy nation. The university has been blessed with the dynamic leadership since its origin and consequently that dynamic leadership has selected the prominent personalities to work on the key positions. As a recent initiative of the university a Deanship of E-Transactions and Communication has been formed to envision and implement the strategic decisions to enhance and extend the electronic environment by providing the services electronically. The deanship is working under the able supervision of Dr. Yousef Al- Ohali [5]. The deanship is further categorized in five departments to undertake specialized tasks. The portal department (PD) is one of the five departments of the deanship and works under the supervision of Abdul Aziz Al-Oraij. The PD [6]has envisioned and implemented state of the art electronic services to ensure that the university can quickly move towards the paperless environment and the ease of use and reliability of data is also increased at the same time to facilitate the information seekers. In order to make the university visible globally an initiative was taken to launch a news portal of the university. The PD under the able guidance of its supervisors and with the support of the team of individuals that it has attracted in the past few years has implemented another very important service called KSU News Portal, which is responsible to publish and advertise the events and other happenings in the university as and when they happen. The portal was launched in 2008 and since that time the trust, security and archival has increased to make it a reliable source of information sharing. The trust can be observed by the fact that almost all announcements, achievements and events are primarily advertised on this portal, where each college and administration unit can upload the information they want to make public. II. SELECTION OF TOOL AND DEVELOPMENT The choice of technology to implement a portal like this was a hectic process and a team of individuals dedicatedly identified three different tools, Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress. The tools were thoroughly studied and their characteristics were identified. Since beginning of this process, the team focused to identify an open source product so not it could not only be customized according to the requirements of this project but the open source community could also be benefited with this. An online comparison tool [1] helped the team to select the best out of available tools that could be used for the development of the news portal in King Saud University. The appropriateness of the tool was accessed based on 8 primary parameters including: System requirement, security, Support, Ease of use, Performance, management, Interpretability, Flexibility, Built-in Application and commerce. Based on these parameters, it was observed that

2 Wordpress is not only an open source platform but also can be more effectively used in establishing the huge solutions like this portal. Wordpress 3.0 [2] contains huge functionality as compared to the previous version (WP 2.0, WP 2.2, WP 2.3, WP 2.5, WP 2.7, WP 2.8 and WP 2.9) the new factures in functionality are discussed in this section. The improvement in the functionality can be categorized in four sub areas, namely general, dashboard, posts and media. A. General Notify if the server environment does not meet the requirements to run php and mysql. wp_login_form() provides a simple login form New WordPress logo for admin header is provided It Place "Search Engines Blocked" mini-alert in the wp-admin header that keep monitoring that the user does not delist itself accidently. Quite a few menu items have been renamed, that include but not limited to Posts->Edit becomes Posts->Posts, and Links->Edit becomes Links- >Links, etc. Administration menu icon has been re-considered before updation Gray Admin Color Scheme has been revised by updating that. The readme file that provides the basics for any software/tool updated. has been extensively revised and Login form is displayed as a response to recover/reset to help the user login. B. Dashboard A new link has been added that becomes accessible after some core update have been made. The Tools->Upgrade menu option has now been moved to Dashboard->Updates and the user interface and themes have been updated and plugin and core updates have been brought under one panel. New way of managing the menu by menu management (navigation) via Menus option under Appearances Menu has been introduced. Password nag has been provided for the newly registered users of the system. The Right Now widget has now been further categorized into Content Discussion to describe possess more effectiveness. C. Posts Has a quick edit mode which allows the removal of all tags. Allow themes to style the visual editor with editor-style.css file, using add_ editor_ style() function. Enable custom taxonomy User Interface for pages as well as for posts An interface has been provided that is used for the purpose of comparing the revisions of user interfaces. Shortlinks have been enabled, but still requires a plug-in or theme support to fully realize this features Added capital_p_dangit() filter to change 'Wordpress' to 'WordPress'. D. Media Add FunnyOrDie.com oembed support Allow Deletion of Media Alt text Change Media User Interface labels from "Post Thumbnails" to "Featured Image" Cleanup of the edit media screen Don't let "Crunching" overlap image name while uploading Optimize scan facility is provided for the attachments that are lost during the process of uploading or later.

3 Support for additional file type extensions is III. provided. CHANGES FOR CUSTOMIZATION AT KSU Along with the features provided in the wordpress 3.0, quite a few localized customization were expected to be provided I order to make it a more effective way of information dispention and communication. Each college and administrative unit is facilitated to upload the news about the current happenings in their domain with their authorized access on the portal, only in the prescribed area of relevance. The news on the portal can be commented by the individuals who require the authentication by the manager of the portal. Following features have been added in the wordpress 3.0, to customize it for the needs of KSU news portal. A. Arabization Arabization of the system As the university is located in the capital city of Saudi Arabia., where Arabic is widely used, it was deemed necessary that an Arabic version of the portal is also provided in order to enable people understand appropriately the contents of this portal in their own language. B. Layout The portal layout was built on the world usability standards where before implementing the standard layout a comparative study among the available standards was made and the best was chosen out of that. It was also considered that quite a few people with disabilities around the globe may be interested to view the contents of the portal. This portal is capable of supporting the people with disabilities to gain meaningful information from this portal. The layout of the website supports the Blind (or with restricted vision) people reading application where we make the system table free and make every element of the website associated with text alias, even the images are included with this feature. The feature has been IV incorporated with a great zeal and effort just to ensure that the academic community, including the students can be equally benefited with the information on the news portal. The layout is built to support people with low vision, color blindness, and genetic defects. A button gives the visitor the ability to increase/decrease the font size without losing the distorting the portal layout. C. One click services The ability for the user to send the article as an to anyone with one click. Print the article with one click and gives it a proper printing layout. Extracting a PDF image from the website for the article. Get a Word Document version with one click. Sharing: on facebook and twitter D. Image Zoom we implemented a jquery code for getting the original sizes of the images in the website where you click on an image and it will give you the original size in a very smooth way and you can navigate between images using the keyboard arrows. E. Integration Integration between WP and the KSU Active Directory has been made and also have Implemented a SSL login where the login URL will automatically take you to a secure page to login to the system. PRESENT STANDING OF THE KSU NEWS PORTAL The KSU new portal has been among the news despite the fact that it actually is a source of originating and publishing the KSU news to the world. A comparative study was conducted in 2010 [3,4], to see the features that other news portals contain as compared to KSU News Portal, which yielded the results shown in Table 1

4 Main Strength Points KSU News Portal Harvard University University of Saskatchewan Layout: Low Visibility Text size Changer Support Blind RSS support RSS easy to find Front Page slide show Clear information spreading on the page. Images with every news article Image captions Every image has an alter Ability to share articles with other website with one click Clear distributed Categories Visitors Can comment on news Multi lingual Portal Diversity in the news Using Social Networks ( Face book, & Twitter ) Using video on the news portal News search support Table 1: The results of comparative study of three news portals

It can be observed that the KSU News Portal contains the highest functionality as compared to the news portals of other leading universities in the world.

5 It can be observed that the KSU News Portal contains the highest functionality as compared to the news portals of other leading universities in the world. Thus KSU news portal may very promptly claim of being the portal with most functionality among the world. As the results of study above suggest that the KSU News Portal has more functionality as compared to most of the news portals of leading universities, the amount of confidence and trust to this portal has also increased. This can also be depicted by the last six month statistics (Oct 10 Mar 11) about the web portal, in Figure 1 and Table 2. The authors are thankful to the authorities in Portal department and Deanship of E-Transaction of the King Saud university, for sharing their valuable data and providing help in translation, explanation and understanding of contents. References [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] Fig 1: The KSU News portal Statistics 6 Month 1 Month Daily Hourly Visitors 256, Action , Conclusion Table 2: Time wise Portal Statistics It can be concluded that the KSU News portal follows a state of the art technology for its development and includes a huge list of features out of which some are only present in the KSU News Portal. It has a documented way of allowing access to publish information and also a check that which comments can be made public. The Statistics show that the trust on this portal is increasing day by day. This can be seen by the increases in visitors and the number of actions per visit. It can further be concluded that this portal has been a huge source of making the KSU visible in national and international discussions. Acknowledgement

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