[Product Developers] on Plone products for newspapers

[Héctor Velarde]

Kai:

this is just to share our current experience and view on what a Plone
solution for a newspaper should include.

first I want to give you a very basic introduction: on every newspaper
we have production and deployment. production means content (text, image
and multimedia) creation. we want to implement this giving all
reporters/photographers a way to insert their content in a database. a
reporter, for example, will use a web editor to create XML content that
will be stored on the database. this content has to be revised,
classified and edited by the editors and then would be ready for deployment.

deployment would be the creation of different products with the above
information: a printed edition, a PDF version, a web site, alerts for
mobile phones, etc. every product would have its own specifics, and the
same news article could be presented in different ways depending on
product capabilities: the text could include video and audio on a web
site, a small resume will replace the whole story on mobile phones, etc.

there is a complete set of standards for news articles developed by the
IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council,
http://www.iptc.org/) that includes NewsML, NITF, NewsCodes and IPTC
headers of digital images.

NewsML provide a media-independent, structural framework for multi-media
news. NITF define the content and structure of news articles. NewsCodes
are sets of topics to be assigned as metadata values to news objects.

Plone can be used in many places here, but right now we only have
experience on the deployment of a web site. we have been experimenting
on a breaking news site and also on creating NITF files from the printed
version of the newspaper.

this could be the minimum set of functions every newspaper site will need:

  * NewsML, NITF and multimedia import/export
  * enhanced news items with additional metadata
  * inclusion of video and audio in these news items (PloneArticle, 
BernArticle?)
  * frontpage generation with version control (CompositePack and 
CMFEditions)
  * photo, multimedia and interactive features galleries (ATGoogleVideo, 
ATOdeoAudio, PloneSmoothGallery...)
  * content rating (Content Ratings)
  * automatic summarization and relation of content (Haystack)
  * hit and email counter for items (mxmCounter with some helper product)
  * reader registration (PlonePAS, OpenID enabled)
  * glossaries (Plone Glossary)
  * management of archived editions (?)
  * enhanced searches (TextIndexNG3?)
  * forums and blogs (phpBB, WordPress; yes, this is not Plone but...)
  * RSS 2.0 support (qRSS2Syndication?)
  * email alerts (?)
  * polls (PlonePopoll?)
  * chats (PloneChat?)
  * ad manager (Openads, this is also PHP based)
  * classified ads (?)
  * social bookmarking (Plonelicious, PloneBookmarklets?)
  * tag cloud navigation (TagCloud)
  * PDF generation (Plone2PDF?)
  * Google/Yahoo! sitemaps (qPloneGoogleSitemaps)
  * support for Open Archives Initiative (Z Open Archives)
  * text only version (?)
  * wap support (?)
  * sports stuff (?)
  * finance stuff (?)
  * etc.

what we want to do is create a product (or products) for all the IPTC 
stuff and decoration of Images and News Items.

also a different product could be created with information and layout
specific for every newspaper including:

  * taxonomies (section names, NewsCodes, etc.) (?)
  * workflows (?)
  * CSS, JavaScript and templates
  * different layouts

well, this is my initial contribution to the brainstorming.

please let me know what do you think.

best regards

-- 

Héctor Velarde
Desarrollo e Internet
La Jornada
+52 (55) 9183 0300 x4160