RUNNING HEAD: LAB 1 – MONARCHPRESS DESCRIPTION 1

Lab 1 – MonarchPress Product Description

Edward Kennedy

Old Dominion University

CS411W

Janet Brunelle

September 20, 2015

Version 2

LAB 1 – MONARCHPRESS DESCRIPTION 2

Table of Contents

1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 3

2. Product Description .......................................................................................................................... 4

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

2.2 Major Components (Hardware/Software) ................................................................................. 5

3. Identification of Case Study .............................................................................................................. 7

4. Product Prototype Description ......................................................................................................... 7

4.1 Prototype Architecture (Hardware/Software) ........................................................................... 7

4.2 Prototype Features and Capabilities .......................................................................................... 9

4.3 Prototype Development Challenges ........................................................................................ 12

5. Glossary ........................................................................................................................................... 13

6. References....................................................................................................................................... 15

List of Figures

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

Figure 2: Prototype Major Functional Component Diagram ................................................................ 9

Figure 3: Real World – Prototype Comparison ................................................................................... 11

LAB 1 – MONARCHPRESS DESCRIPTION 3

Lab 1 – MonarchPress Description

1. Introduction

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

daily news (Viner, 2013). The growing trend of readers getting their news from online publications

makes it necessary that news organizations establish an online presence. 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 high-quality

content to capture consumer interest and grow readership.

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

design and development. Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, ranked number two in

the United States by USA Today (Stockwell, 2015), only offers two courses related to digital journalism in

their current undergraduate curriculum. Since many journalists are classically trained in print

journalism, which focuses more on investigating and reporting events in printed form, they often lack

the knowledge necessary to present stories in an interactive way online. Many students are not

prepared for the digital world that they will eventually be thrown into because colleges and universities

have been slow to modifying the curricula for today’s type of work (Schmitz & Royal, 2013).

One reason universities have been slow to add digital journalism programs is because of how

expensive it is. Many university news organizations are given shockingly small budgets. The Mace &

Crown, Old Dominion University’s news organization, received just $32,380 last year (Mayfield, 2014).

Jugal Patel, Digital Editor for the Mace & Crown, stated that less than six percent of the budget is

allocated towards digital journalism.

MonarchPress is an open source solution with the goal to provide university news organizations,

as well as other small news publications with tight budgets, the ability to produce high-quality news

LAB 1 – MONARCHPRESS DESCRIPTION 4 content without needing in-depth programming knowledge and experience to meet the increasing

demand for captivating online content.

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 helps

news organizations by providing journalists the ability to create news stories on the Internet without

having to have significant technical knowledge. The product also allows 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 adding of social media comments on the topic. In addition to similar issues on social

media, a journalist can attach aggregated news articles about the same issue, creating a living document

dedicated to the subject.

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 Management 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’

LAB 1 – MONARCHPRESS DESCRIPTION 5 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’s Digital Editor, Jugal Patel, recently said the current site 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 hardware requirements are minimal and do not require any

additional resources. The current Mace & Crown plan is more than sufficient and allows more than

three times more of the unique visitors than what they currently see.

Figure 1 represents the major functional components of MonarchPress. The diagram depicts

three functional parts that are refined further down into specifics. First is the presentation component

which 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 and 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 stored to the next component. All PHP

back-end code in this component is run through Apache.

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

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

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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 the LAMP components will be hosted on an Ubuntu Linux server.

3. Identification of Case Study

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

and Crown. The Mace & Crown is competing with other news organizations by increasing their digital

footprint. A digital news organization has costs that the Mace & Crown currently does not have

allocated in the 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 WordPress, a free open source product which the Mace and Crown is

already using, it allows for a solution that does not differ too much from what they are already use. 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 demonstrate 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. Some features and functionality will have to be eliminated in order to meet time

requirements.

4.1 Prototype Architecture (Hardware/Software)

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

data presentation. Social media will be tested on test topics to make sure connections can be made and

verify Twitter’s APIs work as expected. The LAMP stack will be running on an Ubuntu virtual machine

(VM). The VM will be hosted by Old Dominion University’s computer science department. Apache will

LAB 1 – MONARCHPRESS DESCRIPTION 8 be running on the VM as the webserver to serve up the front-end HTML, JavaScript and CSS. PHP 5.6 or

greater will be installed on the VM in order to meet WordPress compatibility requirements and will be

used for the back-end of the product the send and retrieve data from the database. The database will

be MySQL 5.5 or greater to meet WordPress compatibility requirements and is where mock data will

reside for testing purposes. Figure 2 is a visual representation of how Monarch press will be developed

and configured.

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LAB 1 – MONARCHPRESS DESCRIPTION 9

Figure 2: Prototype Major Functional Component Diagram

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

demonstrate how content submission is reviewed for newly created or edited content. The prototype

will also show how some users have elevated permissions over others. Some partial demonstrable

LAB 1 – MONARCHPRESS DESCRIPTION 10 features include user login, data visualization elements, twitter feed aggregation, administrator controls,

and page editing. Figure 3 illustrates the differences between the prototype and the production and

shows what features will be available when the prototype is delivered.

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LAB 1 – MONARCHPRESS DESCRIPTION 11

Figure 3: Real World – Prototype Comparison

LAB 1 – MONARCHPRESS DESCRIPTION 12 4.3 Prototype Development Challenges

A potential for road blocks that could prevent MonarchPress from reaching completion. The

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

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

The makeup of our team has changed as well as roles. These changes should not prevent a successful

delivery but it could cause different development milestones to change as it relates to time.

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LAB 1 – MONARCHPRESS DESCRIPTION 13

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 types 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 through twitter or a researcher.

Is not, someone that is part of the news organization.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): a simple mechanism for adding style to Web documents.

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.

LAB 1 – MONARCHPRESS DESCRIPTION 14 Living Document: dynamic 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.

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 15

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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Content Management Systems Market Report. (2015, September 1). Retrieved September 20,

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

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http://ww2.odu.edu/ao/alumni_magazine/fall03/Deadlines%20and%20Headlines.html

Django CMS. (2015). Retrieved September 21, 2015, from http://www.django-cms.org/en/

Gillmor, D. (2005, February 4). Where Newspapers Can Start the Conversation.

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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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