News Package Requirements

by Dennis Gregorovic

Introduction

The following is a requirements document for the News package to be released with ACS 4.0.

Vision Statement

Posting news information is one of the most fundamental behaviors of a community. The News package allows community members to post news items of interest to various subcommunities of a site.

System/Application Overview

The News package maintains a set of news items. Each news item consists of a title, body, release date, and (optionally) an expiration date. News items are visible only after their release date has passed, and become available once the expiration date is passed (if one is specified).

Every news item falls within the context of one and only one subsite (in the degenerate case, this is the main site). An item is displayed only within the context of the subsite to which it belongs.

Use-cases and User-scenarios

The Subsites functionality is intended for use by two different classes of users:
  1. Community members use the News package to see current news postings.
  2. Subsite administrators use the News package to post news of interest to community members.
Assume that www.company.com is running ACS 4.0. On their web site they have a Boston Office subcommunity. Jane Administrator is the subsite admin for the Boston Office subsite. Instead of spamming the employees in the office with Boston news, she decides to enable the News package for their subsite.

First, she checks that the News package is installed and enabled for Office subsites. If it's not, then Jane must ask Judy Sitewide Administrator to do this. Once the News package is installed and enabled for Office subsites, Jane enables the News package specifically for the Boston Office subsite. Jane can also change some of the News configuration for the Boston Office subsite if she so chooses.

Up until now, Jane has been using the Subsite Administration Tools. Now that the News package is ready, she can start adding news postings. Jane does this by going to the admin pages of the News package. Jane can also edit existing news items.

Joe User works in the Boston Office. By visiting the Boston Office News site Joe can read up any any current news.

Related Links

Requirements: API

There is no API provided by this package.

Requirements: The User Interface

The Community Member's Interface

The user interface for community members is a set of HTML pages that display news items for a subsite.

The Subsite Administrator's Interface

The user interface for subsite administrators is a set of HTML pages for adding and editing news items.
dennis@arsdigita.com
Last modified: Mon Aug 14 18:01:44 2000