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The Media Relations site serves as a means of distributing press releases about Brown University to the media.
User Roles and Permissions
There are two primary roles: writers and editors. A writer can create content, but must submit it for approval by an editor. Editors can do everything that writers can do as well as the ability to put the final touch on any story or web page.
Writers can create "personal drafts" for themselves as they are creating a press release, and then submit it for review to an editor. Once an editor has approved the press release, the writer can no longer edit the press release's content.
Editors have the ability to post a press release as a "draft" which is available to view by any anonymous user, but is not located in the search index or in story archives. It is effectively hidden except through the direct URL while displaying a prominent draft message to the viewer. This allows the editor to send the link to others for approval - such as sending to a scientist for fact checking.
Press releases can also be posted as "embargoed" - it has the same view permissions as the "draft" but it will be published at a designated time. It displays a prominent embargo message, and informs the viewer when the official publish date will be.
Content
The primary content is generated through press releases. Authors have a WYSIWYG editor to enter rich text and embed images.
Images can be uploaded individually, or from within the press release interface. They are resized automatically, and a few preset sizes are available for the author to pick from, or they can create a custom size. A title, description and credit can be attributed to an image, and will be automatically displayed with the image when inserted in a news article. Each image can be tagged to facilitate sorting through the image archive.
There is also the ability to create short "news blurbs" to draw attention to important or interesting information that is too small to be a typical news story.
The news blurbs are a flexible type of content allowing quick addition of a new type of content. For example, if a news blurb is called an "award" they can easily be themed individually, and displayed as a block on the sidebar. New types of small content can be quickly added to the site in this fashion.
Staff Members as Authors
The staff member page also doubles as a means of linking author information with the author of a press release. A change of name (such as marriage) or email address can quickly be applied to all previous press releases. Additional contact information, or even a link to an author profile can be added with ease.
When a user creates a new press release, the author will automatically default to their profile. They can then change the author if they are submitting someone else's content.
Front Page Management
Editors are not limited to have the front page only sort by the latest articles. They can chose which articles should go to the front page, and which should be archived. Although by default all stories marked for the homepage will appear in chronological order, there can be any number of articles in any order. This allows important articles to remain at the top of the page for days, while interesting older articles can remain at the bottom.
Special thanks to Mac for assisting me with his more advanced programing skills.