NCAR UCAR|NCAR|Search|Contact
NCAR Advancing the NCAR Strategic Plan  

WORD Software Requirements

   
   

Overall Site Requirements

The majority of the WORD umbrella site will consist of static HTML content with common header, navigation and footer elements. Pages that have news or events listed on them will be dynamic and require database interaction. The site will include several web applications, including a news metadata administrator application, a feedback form director, and integration of WEQC. Since the site is an umbrella over numerous other web sites and UCAR functionality, it will need to provide flexible integration or at least coexistence between numerous web technologies such as JSP, PHP, PERL, and ColdFusion.

News Metadata Web Application

This web application will store metadata about featured stories and news available anywhere in the NCAR/UCAR web presence. Because our featured news pages have such different page layout requirements, we will not be building the content pages dynamically. This web application deals solely with metadata for existing URLs in order to build catalogs and lists that act as a unifying interface to news pages. Specifically, the server will store metadata about the following:

Categories

  • press releases
  • featured stories
  • people features
  • site spotlights
  • fast facts
  • news spotlights
  • newsletter articles

Interfaces

There will be four sets of interfaces to this web application:

  1. Gatekeeper protected form for UCAR employees to suggest an existing article by providing metadata for it
  2. ACL-protected or Gatekeeper/usergroup-protected Administrator interface for several UCAR Communications employees to create, edit, approve, reject, delete, categorize, and archive records
  3. Dynamic web pages that display metata in list form giving web developers as much control as possible over recordset control, sorting, and appearance
  4. An application that will transform the metadata on a croned basis into an RSS XML news feed for use by any website. There will be a separate news feed for each bulleted record category above and news feeds will include a maximum of one year of records.

Columns

The database will store the following columns. Auto-populate fields will not appear on forms.

  • Category (from list above)
  • Type
    • press releases: national, local, unlisted
    • site spotlights: home, governance
    • news spotlights: members/affiliates, research community
    • other categories may develop types in future
  • Title
  • URL
  • Short description (one sentence)
  • Long description (one paragraph)
  • URL for thumbnail image (150 pixels wide)
  • Author
  • Source publication
  • Release Date
  • Submitter (auto-populate based on login userid)
  • Submitter email (auto-populate based on login userid)
  • Date updated (auto-populate based on all actions)
  • Updater (auto-populate based on all actions)
  • Approved by (auto-populate based on approve action)
  • Expire date
  • any other fields required by RSS standards or relational model

Issues

  • Does UCAR Communications want any of the news item categories listed above to be fully database-driven pages?
    No although perhaps press releases in the future.
  • What are the news search requirements?
    Search on any field in admin interface. WORD site will use url path Verity searches in several places for full text search.
  • Should site spotlight and fast fact metadata be stored in separate databases to improve random lookup performance and because they do not require all these fields?
    No, different categories will share a core table for common columns and reference related tables to extend their stored data.

Use Cases

1. Any UCAR employee creates record

  1. Goes to URL for News Metadata Administration application (or a different URL for non-admins)
  2. Logs in with username and password
  3. Only sees create functionality
  4. Selects a category from popup list and clicks Create button
  5. Fills out form for that specific category of record (non-relevent fields don't appear) and clicks Preview button
  6. Sees preview of how metadata record will appear in context
  7. Clicks Submit for Approval button
  8. Sees verification of submission including record number

2. UCAR Communications Employee or any WORD production team member creates record

  1. Goes to URL for News Metadata Administration application
  2. Logs in with username and password
  3. Sees full admin functionality for create, read, update, delete, approve
  4. Selects a category from popup list and clicks Create button
  5. Fills out form for that specific category of record (non-relevent fields don't appear) and clicks Preview
  6. Sees preview of how metadata record will appear in context
  7. Clicks Save or clicks Save & Approve

3. UCAR Communications Employee approves record

  1. Goes to URL for News Metadata Administration application
  2. Logs in with username and password
  3. Clicks Review Pending button
  4. Sees a columnar list of Category, Title, Author, Source Publication, and an Edit button, with Title as a link to the URL
  5. Clicks Edit button for a row
  6. Reviews form, making any necessary changes and clicks Preview, Save (for later approval), Save & Approve, Reject or Expire
  7. User clicks Preview and sees record in it's likely context with buttons to Save (for later approval), Save & Approve, Reject or Expire
  8. Return to refreshed Review Pending list

4. UCAR Communications Employee or any WORD production team member searches for and edits a specific record

  1. Goes to URL for News Metadata Administration application
  2. Logs in with username and password
  3. Clicks Search Metadata button
  4. Fills out one or more fields in form of all metadata fields (no enforcement of record category)
  5. Sees a columnar list of Category, Title, Author, Source Publication, and an Edit button, with Title as a link to the URL
  6. Clicks Edit button for a row
  7. Sees it is the wrong record and presses back button in browser
  8. Clicks Edit button for a different row
  9. Reviews form, making any necessary changes and clicks Preview, Save (for later approval), Save & Approve, Reject (set date approved to null) or Expire
  10. User clicks Preview and sees record in it's likely context with buttons to Save (for later approval), Save & Approve, Reject or Expire
  11. Return to refreshed search results list

5. WORD Home Page Hit

  1. Home page hit results in request to News Metadata Application for current featured story, current people feature, 3 most recent press releases, today's site spotlight and today's fast fact
  2. Application returns necessary information to home page JSP (all info automatically cached on a daily basis at 12:01 am to prevent repeated DB requests).
  3. Home page JSP formats returned metadata for display to user

WEQC Integration

The WEQC web application will be integrated into the interface of the WORD site. This will simply entail some changes to existing interface tiles. WEQC navigation will be demoted to a subnavigation row under the WORD header. It's URL will not change from www.people.ucar.edu.

Today@UCAR Announcements, Seminars, Classifieds, Menu Integration

Although not required at launch, we need to think about how we can display Today@UCAR items on the Staff page and other pages. For instance, the Research Tools page currently calls for a list of the next 2 seminars on the calendar to be displayed. Given that both the staff and research tools pages are candidates for portalization and that This Week will be replaced by a PHP/MySQL implementation within months, we need explore potential short-term and long-term approaches and come up with an integration plan for a phase II WORD launch.

 
 

 

Home | © 2003, UCAR
     
NCAR Satellite NCAR Satellite UCAR NCAR Search Contact Us