Lab 1 MonarchPress Product Description. Robert O Donnell CS411. Janet Brunelle. September 20, Version #2

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1 Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 1 Lab 1 MonarchPress Product Description Robert O Donnell CS411 Janet Brunelle September 20, 2015 Version #2

2 Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 2 Table of Contents 1 INTRODUCTION MONARCHPRESS PRODUCT DESCRIPTION Key Product Features and Capabilities Major Components (Hardware/Software) IDENTIFICATION OF CASE STUDY PRODUCT PROTOTYPE DESCRIPTION Prototype Architectures (Hardware/Software) Prototype Features and Capabilities Prototype Development Challenges Glossary of Terms References List of Figures Figure 1. Major functional component diagram... 6 Figure 2. Prototype major functional component diagram List of Tables Table 1. Feature comparison between full product and prototype... 9

3 Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 3 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

4 Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 4 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.

5 Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 5 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.

6 Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 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]

7 Figure 1. Major functional component diagram Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 7

8 Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 8 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 or higher). The database language being used is MySql (version 5.0 or higher).

9 Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 9 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.

10 Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 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. [This space intentionally left blank]

11 Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 11 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

12 Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 12 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 s to the user. [This space intentionally left blank]

13 Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 13 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

14 Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 14 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

15 Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 15 solve this would be to make the development environment as close as to the production environment.

16 Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 16 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.

17 Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 17 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.

18 Lab 1 MonarchPress Description 18 REFERENCES Social Networking Fact Sheet. (2013, December 27). Retrieved September 20, 2015, from Viner, K. (2013, October 9). The rise of the reader: Journalism in the age of the open web. Retrieved September 21, 2015, from WordPress hosting without the hassle GoDaddy Pro. (n.d.). Retrieved September 21, 2015, from

Lab 1 MonarchPress Product Description. Robert O Donnell. Old Dominion University CS411. Janet Brunelle. November 23, 2015.

Running Head: LAB 1 MONACHPRESS PRODUCT DESCRIPTION Lab 1 MonarchPress Product Description Robert O Donnell Old Dominion University CS411 Janet Brunelle November 23, 2015 Version #3 1 2 Table of Contents