Running Head: Lab 1 – MonarchPress Description 1

Lab 1 – MonarchPress Product Description

Edward Kennedy

CS411W

Janet Brunelle

September 20, 2015

Version 1

Lab 1 – MonarchPress Description 2

Table of Contents

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

2 PRODUCT DESCRIPTION ...........................................................................................................3

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

2.2 Major Components (Hardware/Software) ..............................................................................4

3 IDENTIFICATION OF CASE STUDY ..............................................................................................7

4 PRODUCT PROTOTYPE DESCRIPTION ........................................................................................7

4.1 Prototype Architecture (Hardware/Software) ........................................................................9

4.2 Prototype Features and Capabilities .................................................................................... 10

5 GLOSSARY ............................................................................................................................. 10

6 REFERENCES .......................................................................................................................... 13

List of Figures

Figure 1: Major Functional Component Diagram ..........................................................................6

Figure 2: Real World – Prototype Comparison .............................................................................8

Figure 3: Prototype Major Functional Component Diagram ..........................................................9

Lab 1 – MonarchPress Description 3

1 INTRODUCTION

News publications have long used paper as the traditional medium for readers to consume the

daily news. The growing trend of readers getting their news from online publications makes it necessary

that news organizations establish an online presence to satisfy customer consumption needs. In order

to compete in an industry where consumers are increasingly utilizing the Internet to get the news, it is

imperative that today’s journalists are equipped with technology-oriented skills to create and maintain a

high quality news publication.

Budding journalist coming out of college have rarely had to do any work that involved website

design and development. Since many journalists are focused on writing and presentation of a story they

lack the knowledge necessary to present stories in an interactive way online. A quick look at major

universities offering degrees in journalism shows that most programs do not offer anything in terms of

online journalism.

MonarchPress is the solution that helps journalists focus on creating quality news content

onlinewithout having to know the technical details of how to do it.

2 PRODUCT DESCRIPTION

MonarchPress is a suite of Wordpress plugins that provide simple and easy to use tools for

adding dynamic social media content, aggregated news feeds, and layout editing. MonarchPress tries to

help news organizations out by providing a way to let journalists create stories on the Internet without

Lab 1 – MonarchPress Description 4 having to have too much technical knowledge. The product also tries to allow ways of integrating social

media into a story using existing APIs.

2.1 Key Product Features and Capabilities

MonarchPress empowers journalists who are not tech savvy to easily customize new online

stories. The drag and drop feature lets the writer edit how the story is presented by dragging and

dropping different elements on the screen that represent the layout of the page. The software suite

also allows the for adding social media comments about the topic that the story is about. In addition to

similar topics on social media, a journalist can attach aggregated new articles about the same topic

creating a living document dedicated to the topic.

Since many universities do not have the budgets for buying and maintaining expensive

software/hardware suites to support the university news organization, MonarchPress runs on

Wordpress which is free and open for any organization to use. In fact, Wordpress is the most used

Content Managemet System (CMS) on the Internet with many news leaders using it for their own CMS.

Students majoring in journalism at universities all over the world are not taught how to build

and design web pages. Most college curricula in journalism have little to no classes in online journalism.

Northwestern University, considered by many to be one of the top 10 universities for journalism in the

United States, has only two classes dedicated to online journalism. MonarchPress helps solve students’

lack of technical knowledge by empowering students to design and develop a web page for a story

without having to know the technical details.

2.2 Major Components (Hardware/Software)

The Mace & Crown currently sees twenty-five thousand monthly visitors, and out of that,

approximately eight thousand seven hundred are unique. Since the current volume is so low the

Lab 1 – MonarchPress Description 5 hardware requirements are very humble. The current Mace & Crown plan is more than sufficient which

allows for twenty-five thousand unique visitors which is more than three times more than they see.

Figure 1 represents the major functional components of MonarchPress. It depicts 3 functional

parts that are broken further down into specifics. First is the presentation component where users

interact with the system. Users with elevated permissions can create and edit a content,

administrator(s) can manage user roles and control user access, and visitors can read articles and

interact with social media content.

The second functional piece is the logic component. This is where all the decision making occurs

on the server. When the users of MonarchPress interact with the presentation component, calls to the

server are made to get more data for presentation or data is persisted to the next component.

Everything in this component is run through Apache.

The last functional piece is the data component. This is where the database persists user

accounts, cached twitter feeds, user comments, and design templates.

Lab 1 – MonarchPress Description 6

Figure 1: Major Functional Component Diagram

Lab 1 – MonarchPress Description 7 The software being developed will be built on a Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP ) stack

with Javascript, HTML and CSS for the front-end user interface. The drag and drop feature will be

developed using Javascript and CSS. The logic and connections to the database will be developed using

PHP. All of which will be hosted on Linux with Apache running as the application server.

3 IDENTIFICATION OF CASE STUDY

MonarchPress is being developed for Old Dominion University’s school newspaper, the Mace

and Crown. The Mace & Crown want to compete with other new organizations by increasing their

digital footprint. Being a digital news organization brings costs that the Mace & Crown currently do not

have allocated in their budget. MonarchPress allows the Mace and Crown to compete by giving

journalists the power to create digital content without needing the knowledge of developing and

designing web pages. Since MonarchPress leverages the Wordpress, a free open source product which

the Mace and Crown is already using, it allows for a solution that does not fall to far from what they are

already used to. In the future other university student news publications or local news organizations

with limited budgets can make use of MonarchPress.

4 PRODUCT PROTOTYPE DESCRIPTION

The prototype of MonarchPress is developed to show how its key features work in the “real

world”. The environment will also allow for testing use cases. Features in the prototype will contain a

subset of the full product. We have to eliminate some functionality in order to meet time requirements.

Figure 2 shows the differences between the prototype and the fully featured product.

Lab 1 – MonarchPress Description 8

Figure 2: Real World – Prototype Comparison

Lab 1 – MonarchPress Description 9 4.1 Prototype Architecture (Hardware/Software)

The prototype will contain mock user accounts, static content and data visualizations to test

data presentation. We will leverage social media on test topics to make sure we can connect and utilize

Twitter’s APIs correctly. The LAMP stack will be running on an Ubuntu virtual machine (VM).

Figure 3: Prototype Major Functional Component Diagram

Lab 1 – MonarchPress Description 10 4.2 Prototype Features and Capabilities

The prototype demonstrates the how a user can drag and drop elements within a grid structure

to design and develop content as well as standard content presentation. The prototype will also

demonstrate submission review for newly created or edited content and how some users have elevated

permissions over others. Some partial demonstrable features include user login, data visualization

elements, twitter feed aggregation, administrator controls, and page editing.

4.3 Prototype Development Challenges

There is a potential for road blocks that could prevent MonarchPress from reaching completion.

The lack of experience in WordPress, PHP, SQL, CSS and JavaScript could prevent features being finished

on time. Open source documentation and community support should prevent setbacks in experience.

5 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.

Lab 1 – MonarchPress Description 11 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.

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.

Lab 1 – MonarchPress Description 12 Plugin: a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing software application.

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

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

Lab 1 – MonarchPress Description 13 6 REFERENCES

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http://www.armstrongcms.org

Bartlett, R. (2014, January 7). 10 key skills for digital journalists to hone in 2014 | Media

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Corneliussen, S. (2003). Read All About It ... In The Student Paper. Retrieved September 20,

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l

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Krotoski, A. (2011, February 19). What effect has the internet had on journalism? Retrieved

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effect-internet-on-journalism

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http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Living_document&oldid=646745657

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