Sample RFP

Summary

The New OSCOM Times (NOT), a Really Big Newspaper Company, wants to migrate their homegrown web publishing system to a content management system, preferably open source. This system will be responsible for the following major activities:

General Requirements

NOT Site Structure

The NOT site will have the following major sections:

Each section has an editor for that section. For instance, the Sports section has a Sports Editor. This job can be held by more than one person. But an editor for one section should not be able to work in another section.

The Front Page section doesn't directly contain articles. However, like all sections, it can contain design artifacts such as images and templates.

The CMS should also permit creation of multiple sites within the server. Thus, if NOT wants to add a site for a specialty publication, this should be a simple step.

Sites and Users

NOT would like, in the future, to launch separately-branded sites for real estate, classifieds, and autos. Thus, the CMS should allow easy creation of multiple sites in the same server.

The CMS should allow a site manager to login and perform all tasks of any privilege. This site manager user will be responsible for managing the accounts of section editors, including:

The system should allow easy creation of user accounts for each section. A section editor user should only have permission to manage articles in a particular section.

Organizing the Structure

As shown in the wireframe, the NOT site is organized into sections. Each section will have contain an indefinite number or articles. For the first version, a section may only contain:

If a section contains a subsection, the subsection should show up in the section listing for all articles in the site.

Some sections may have a slightly altered template structure, as discussed above.

Templates

The look and feel of the NOT site will be managed globally by templates. The template structure will be set on all articles.

There are two types of templates: the global template, with elements common to all articles, and section templates, which adapt the specifics for a certain section. The following diagram shows the template structure.

All articles in all sections will share the following blocks from this diagram: Logo/Masthead, Ad, Section Listing, Article Text, and Footer.

The Front Page section will show the Weather in the block labelled "Weather or Ad". All other sections will show another Ad.

The Breaking News section is displayed only in the Front Page and Sports sections.

For the section home page, the Article Text box will show a listing of the ten most recent articles, sorted in reverse chronological order. Each listing should provide a hyperlink to visit that article.

For each article, the article text will place an H2 tag with the value of the article title. Below this the body of the article will be placed.

The section listing will show all the sections and subsections in the site. The only difference from page to page is that the current section or subsection will be highlighted with a different background color than the others.

HTML mockups of each of these sections, with sample content, will be provided later. (Workshop note: We could use some help with this part.)

Managing Content

The new CMS for NOT is focused on creating a productive content management environment for newspaper staff. Thus, the CMS should make it easy and productive to locate, create, and publish articles.

The content management interface should permit the following section editor functions in a section:

The CMS should also allow the site manager to perform the following activities:

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