Project: Editorial Workflow

Submitted by swechao on Thu, 2009-09-17 20:12

Brief description: In a typical newspaper, news comes in from various geographically distributed divisions and each news item has it's own importance. In order that a news article gets printed in a newspaper the new item has to flow through different levels of hierarchy, right from the lowest point in a branch office to the highest point (editor/sub-editor) in the head office. In this journey, each item has to be categorised according to it's importance before finally reaching the layout artist who will then design the page according to the the priority of the item. This project will provide the entire workflow for the life cycle of a news item from beginning to end. This project will also take care of storage and archival of the news items.Different people with various levels of permissions work on a single news item and project will encompass the user management to satisfy this requirement.

Technologies involved:

  • Plone: Plone is a Content Management Framework (CMS) written in zope. This is the main framework over which the project will be built.
  • Zope: Zope work behind Plone providing it with a transactional object database. Initially we may not require to work on Zope but as the project starts taking shape we will work on it.
  • Python: It is this language on which Zope and Plone are build on. Hence knowledge of Python will not only speed up the work but also will enable us to work more efficiently on the project.

Type of work involved: Mostly the work consists of defining the logic of the portal. A part from that coding is also involved.

Applicability of the project: This project is primarily used in a daily newspaper were the content flows in a pattern involving many people. The project can also be used for other purposes where a flow of content is involved across various levels in an organisation.creating a web site can be done using this same project were again a set of teams work on the same site. For example, page layout artist who works on a web development tool decides upon the look and feel of the web. It is the site developers who works on logic of the site. Site maintainers who update the content of the web site can work as-independently-as possible with others in a way to maximise the efficiency of the work flow.

Resources: Since this project is about creating a portal people can work online and timely meetings with the guide will be sufficient.

Project Guide: Pratyush Kotturu (pratyush at openoffice dot org)

No of people required for the project: Initially 3 people are required for this project. Additional people will be involved as required.

URL:

Test Site was created at Editorial workflow