Grant Agreement no : 614002

SCHeMA

INTEGRATED IN SITU CHeMICAL MAPPING PROBE

Collaborative project

OCEAN.2013-2: Innovative multifunctional sensors for in situ monitoring of marine environment and related maritime activities

D 1.1 – Implemented website with project information maintained by a Content Management System

(CMS)

Due M6 (31.03.2014)

Actual submission date: 28.03.2014 Start date of project: October 1

st, 2013 Duration:48 months

Organisation name of lead contractor for this deliverable: UNIGE Revision 1.0

Project co-funded by the European Commission within the Seventh Framework Programme (2007-2013)

Dissemination Level

PU Public x

PP Restricted to other programme participants (including the Commission Services)

RE Restricted to a group specified by the consortium (including the Commission Services)

CO Confidential, only for members of the consortium (including the Commission Services)

Deliverable D1.1

Implemented website with project information maintained by

a Content Management System (CMS)

PU: Public

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Project Number : 614002223975 Project Title : Integrated In Situ CHemical MApping Probe - SCHeMA Deliverable Type : D - Demonstrator

Deliverable Number : D1.1 Title of Deliverable : Implemented website with project information maintained by a

content management system (CMS) Nature of Deliverable : Demonstrator Contractual Delivery Date : 31/03/2014 Actual Delivery Date : 28/03/2014 Contributing WPs : WP1 Author(s) : Paolo D’Angelo (ETT) Antonio Novellino (ETT) Mary-Lou Tercier-Waeber (UNIGE)

Abstract In this deliverable, we describe the SCHeMA project website and its features including details on the Content Management System (CMS) used for its implementation. Both, the public and the private parts are described, and the future implementation for connecting to social media networks (i.e. facebook, twitter) discussed.

Keyword list Website, CMS, DotNetNuke

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Table of content

Table of content ________________________________________________________________ 4

1 Introduction _______________________________________________________________ 5

2 Content Management System _________________________________________________ 6

2.1 DotNetNuke ___________________________________________________________________ 6 2.1.1 DNN Architecture ______________________________________________________________________ 6 2.1.2 DNN Modules _________________________________________________________________________ 7 2.1.3 DNN Skins ____________________________________________________________________________ 8

3 The SCHeMA project website _________________________________________________ 9

3.1 Public vs. Private access ________________________________________________________ 10

3.2 Admin _______________________________________________________________________ 13

3.3 Web site access analysis ________________________________________________________ 14

4 Future implementations ____________________________________________________ 16

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1 Introduction

In this deliverable, we describe the SCHeMA project website structure and its features including

details on the Content Management System (CMS) used for its implementation. Both, the part

accessible to the public and the SCHeMA consortium and PO restricted area are described. The

future implementation for connecting to social media networks is reported.

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2 Content Management System

The use of a Content Management System (CMS) for a web portal is a strategic and important

choice in order to be fast in the communication and ready in the process of information update.

These are key aspects to insure that the website stay always lively and thus attractive.

Moreover the development of a website using a CMS is usually much easier as it allows all the

users, not only computer programmers or IT specialists, to modify in real time all the contents that

resides in a database and are dynamically related.

Usually a CMS is structured in two parts: the back and front parts. The back part is the

administrative interface that allows managing the website configurations and the contents in a very

simple way. The front part is the public section that is the real website with the content, service and

information we want to provide to the users.

The CMS chosen for the development of the SCHeMA Website is DotNetNuke (DNN)

(www.dnnsoftware.com); a well-known open source software based on Microsoft.NET. This choice

was made as this CMS is a Microsoft based open source which guarantee continuous updates, a

significant flexibility in terms of software development and extensibility, and a vast user community

that provides a constant source of modules and information.

2.1 DotNetNuke

The DNN Platform is open source software intended to allow management of websites without

much technical knowledge. Another feature is that it is extensible through a large number of third-

party apps to provide functionality not included in the DNN core modules. More details are reported

below.

2.1.1 DNN Architecture

The DNN architecture is schematically represented in Figure 1. DotNetNuke uses a three-tier

architecture model with a core framework providing support to the extensible modular structure.

DotNetNuke can be extended using 3rd-party modules and functionalities added by suppliers . The

appearance of individual sites can be customized using skins (see section 3.1.3). DotNetNuke 7.x.x

requires Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2012, the respective SQL version, and IIS 7+.

5.x generation of DotNetNuke requires Internet Information Services 6 and ASP.NET v2.0 to v4 and

supports SQL Server 2005 and 2008. Previous generations of DotNetNuke supported SQL Server

2000 and ASP.NET v1.1.

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Figure 1: DNN Architecture

2.1.2 DNN Modules

The default functionality of DotNetNuke can be expanded by adding third-party modules, either from

an existing library of modules, or through in-house development of custom functionality (Figure 2).

The DotNetNuke framework provides basic functionality such as security, user administration and

content management, while modules are used to tailor the web site to specific deployment needs.

A set of primary modules are included with the core DotNetNuke distribution. These modules

provide the functionality required to create an e-commerce system, an intranet, a public web site or

a custom web application. They are maintained by a volunteer team community on the DotNetNuke

Community Forge.

Figure 2: DNN Modules

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A module can be uploaded and automatically installed on a DotNetNuke platform through the

administration pages of DotNetNuke. Once a module is added by the administrator, it can be placed

on any of the pages in the web site and custom access permissions can be configured for it. A

module can be developed in Vb.net or in C#.Net.

2.1.3 DNN Skins

A skinning architecture provides a separation between design and content, enabling a web designer

to develop skins (Figure 2) without requiring any specialized knowledge of development in

ASP.NET. Only knowledge of HTML and an understanding of how to prepare and package the skins

themselves are required. Skins consist of basic HTML files with placeholders (tokens) for content,

menus and other functionality, along with support files such as images, style sheets and JavaScript,

packaged in a ZIP file.

Upon Microsoft's release of the .NET Framework version 2, Microsoft had included functionalities

known as master pages. The principal idea behind master pages was to encourage code recycling

and consistent design as well as aesthetics throughout a site by creating a master page with

placeholders which, at runtime, will be compiled and replaced by content.

As for the modules, skins can be uploaded and automatically installed through the administration

pages. If the compiled skin does not contain an ASP.NET user control file, then the DotNetNuke

skinning engine builds one based on various tokens included in the HTML file which refer to various

sections, placeholders and/or modules of a DotNetNuke-produced page. A number of discussions

on the DotNetNuke forums debate the differences between designing skins in "pure" HTML and

Cascading Style Sheets, or creating skins in Visual Studio as ASP.NET user controls.

Since version 4.4, skin developers have been able to specify skin-level DOCTYPEs to allow them to

develop skins that follow accessibility and XHTML standards.

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3 The SCHeMA project website

The SCHeMA project website is available at the address www.schema-ocean.eu.

Figure 3: Copy of part of the SCHeMA homepage

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It is composed of different pages with information about the project. The Table 1 describes all the

sections developed so far:

Table 1: SCHeMA portal main pages

Page Description

Home

Homepage of the website: short description of the project, project news preview, RSS feed preview, image gallery, main menu. Access to the private section and social media network links (Twitter, Facebook)

The Schema Project Project description and coordinator information, image gallery

Consortium Consortium member description, links to the partner’s website and contacts

Dissemination Public documents regarding the project (factsheets, public deliverables, communications, published scientific papers)

Partners Area Private area (see section 4.1)

News & Events News about the project and events related to the SCHeMA and other projects on Marine Monitoring

Links Links to related websites

Contact us Address & E-mail of the Coordinator

There are 3 types of access to the website, each with different features:

Public: no registration required. Only the public pages are visible to everyone visiting the

site.

Private: access is granted only to registered users (the consortium members and the PO)

Admin: only for website administrator

3.1 Public vs. Private access

The difference between public and private access is mainly related to the Partners Area

Dissemination page.

In this area, documents regarding the project activities (deliverable, presentations, data, etc…) can

be upload. The upload feature is available only to registered users (i.e. the consortium members).

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Figure 4: Login page

When the user is logged in, the Partners and the Dissemination pages show also the upload control:

Figure 5: Documents upload control

The information needed to upload the documents are: the file, a description of the document, a

privacy level and a category in which the document will be shown (general, deliverable, abstracts,

etc…).

Documents uploaded in the Dissemination page are always public while everything that is uploaded

in the Partners page is restricted to registered users.

The most important parameter to select when uploading files in the Partners page is the privacy

level which determines the document visibility level. The following table describe the relations

between privacy and visibility:

Table 2: Privacy and visibility

Privacy Visibility

PP: Restricted The document is available only to the Consortium members and PO as well as to possibly other registered user specified by the Consortium or on EU Commission request

CO: Confidential The document is available only to Consortium members

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The Figure 6 shows example of structure of the Partners Area page:

Figure 6: Example of the Partners Area structure and content

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3.2 Admin

The administrator profile allows the registered user to exploit the full capabilities of the Content

Management System. It provides all the functionalities to revise the structure of the website adding

new pages and/or new modules, and to update the existing pages.

The changes that can be made are divided in two groups:

Typical CMS management: these are the tools provided by DotNetNuke. When logging in as

a superuser, the system shows a Control Bar with different option for managing the website

(Figure 7).

Figure 7: DNN standard CMS interface

The main functions are:

o Admin: manages security roles, accounts and all the general settings of the

application

o Host: manages extensions, the dashboard and site management (i.e. for mobile

applications)

o Tools: upload files, application cache manager

o Help: online help and links to video tutorials on getting started to use DNN.

o Modules: add modules to page, install additional modules

o Pages: edit a single page with standard CMS features

o Users: user’s managements

For further details, a comprehensive online help is available at the address:

http://www.dnnsoftware.com/help.

Custom page management: these are new features created ad-hoc, from existing controls,

in order to let the administrator to easily manage custom pages (Figure 8).

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Figure 8: Administration menu

The custom controls created are:

o Insert News\Events: in this section the user can add, modify and delete entries in the

list of news and events.

o Gallery Manager: manage the image gallery (uploading images, adding effects of the

slideshow)

o Insert Partners/Links: manage both the consortium page and the Links page allowing

the user to add, modify and delete partners information and links to other websites.

3.3 Web site access analysis

In order to analyze the access and the use of the SCHeMA website, a connection to Google

Analytics has been created (Figure 9). Google Analytics (https://www.google.it/analytics) is a very

powerful tool provided by Google that offers a lot of information on the web traffic on a site.

Our intention is to monitor the following data:

Visitor information: info on where visitors came from around the world, how long they

stayed on the site, if they are new or returning visitors, and their bounce rate (is an indication

that they did not find what they are looking for)

Traffic Source Data: info on which site the users come from, from search engines, from

other websites, from emails, from people typing in the web address into their browser, etc.

Content information: which pages in the website are most visited, for how long, how the

visitors browse the site.

All these information are really important to understand if the SCHeMA website is interesting to

other people (regular internet users, scientific researchers, experts). This also can lead the

administrators of the portal to adjust the development strategies in order to increase the traffic to

the website and consequently improve the visibility of the project both in the scientific community

and the general public.

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Figure 9: Example of SCHeMA Google Analytics page

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4 Future implementations

The next step for increasing the visibility of the SCHeMA Portal and its actions is a direct connection

to the channels of the social media networks to further enhance the communication with people

interested in the project activities.

A new Facebook profile will be created to report all the news about the project and allows exchange

of information among researchers and people interested in marine sensing technologies. A twitter

page will provide area for commenting news and events. Finally it will be possible to subscribe to

the SCHeMA RSS Feed that will provide useful information on the website activities and updates.

This strategy is aimed to create a sort of community around the SCHeMA portal that will increase

the interest at the European and International levels for i) the research activities of the SCHeMA

partners thus providing opportunities for new collaborations; and ii) marine research activities and

initiatives in general.