Engineering Te Ara
Publication
Captain Cook's map of New Zealand,
circa 1542
Publishing Te Ara, involves input from a variety of internal and external contributors, researchers, authors and editors. The site's underlying software has to be straightforward and intuitive enough for non-technical contributors, researchers, writers and editors to use productively, and without constraining their creative options. This was achieved by designing templates and workflow processes that leveraged familiarity with the standard Microsoft desktop environment.
The publishing process involves generating, editing and approving content in SharePoint, and then transferring that content to the Microsoft Content Management Server (CMS), with both a staging server and a live server being used. Te Ara's website pages are generated dynamically using the information stored in the CMS database. The pages are generated by ASP.NET templates which contain presentation logic that pulls content from the database. This de-coupling of information from presentation makes changes to layout simple and straightforward, and the entire architecture more robust.
Where possible, tasks have been automated for ease of use and consistency. All the functionality and logic of the content transfer system is contained in the publishing system, which was custom-built by Optimation to run on the staging server.
