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AARP Publishes Online With Zope

AARP, a membership organization of more than thirty-five million members, publishes several web sites through its service subsidiary, ASI (AARP Services, Inc.). In addition to its flagship site www.aarp.org, ASI also publishes the online versions of the AARP bimonthly magazines, www.modernmaturity.org and www.mygeneration.org and has additional web properties.

Each of ASI's web properties share content with each other, but each site requires branding and markup unique to that site. ASI manually crafted each page of HTML, including all of the top-level content navigation pages. This time consuming process was extremely error prone as well as being a major drawback to the publishing process.

"Zope Corporation delivered a system that has really improved the way we manage our web content," said Beth Mazur, Manager of Web Development at AARP. "They worked with us to customize Zope to meet our special needs to publish, given a tiered development platform and a unique network environment. We're using their Zope Replication Server (ZRS) product to ensure the timely controlled migration of data to our production servers."

ASI's publishing model calls for selective staging of content to insure proper quality control. Content is developed, staged for review, and moved into production real time or via a schedule. ASI required a solution that adheres to this flexible publishing model.

Zope Solution Provides Drag And Drop Layout

Zope Corporation crafted a solution for AARP that allowed ASI to use Zope to create page templates, each specifying the general layout of the pages on each site. A content editor selects the content to work with, and can organize it on a template using a drag and drop approach. For browsers that do not support drag and drop or JavaScript, simpler list-based solutions are also implemented, allowing content to be placed into editorially defined slots in the page templates.

Zope's Template Attribute Language provides immense power and flexibility by giving designers the ability to control content within the template. By designating certain portions of the template as slots, the template's contents can be managed via the drag and drop layout controls. Articles support a list of specialized attributes, allowing for pagination, quotation, and element embedding. Page elements represent dynamic content created specifically for embedding within templates or articles.

Articles identify which sites and topics they may appear in. Articles are displayed on the site, based upon the template chosen by the site's designer. The same article may be displayed differently on different sites because each set of templates may be customized for each web property. This means that 'look and feel' may be controlled separately from 'content' so designers and programmers may work independently until they are ready for publication.

Production Servers Concurrently Updated

Content is stored in central libraries, and checked out into personal workspaces or projects. A project aggregates multiple pieces of content into a single point of control for publishing. A central development server acts as the master database server. All changes to the master server are replicated in real time to each secondary server with ZRS. In the event of a storage server failure, the production machines can fail over from their local database to peer storages, providing increased reliability and availability of the Zope hosted websites.

During staging or publication, data is copied into the production and staging areas of the central repository. The production servers deliver data from the production area. The concurrent update allows the site manager to 'publish', 'update', or 'retract' content on an immediate basis, or by scheduling the activity at a later time.

Rapid Development and Deployment

Zope enables rapid development and deployment. The ASI Content Management system went from concept to creation in a short timeframe. The Open Source Zope and CMF platform provides benefit to ASI and AARP, enabling them to control and fine-tune resources. The customer is always in control of the product. ASI can follow the model of components developed by Zope Corporation to synthesize new components as their needs change over time.

Challenges

  • Maintain multiple web properties
  • Share articles between properties
  • Separate authoring from content management
  • Preserve respective branding for each property
  • Facilitate routine site navigation refreshing
  • Stage content through staging servers before publishing
  • Synchronize multiple production servers

Approach

  • Zope Content Management Framework
  • Customized Content Library for Version Control and Publishing
  • Replicated Data with Zope Replication Server
  • Customized Supplemental Page Markup for pagination and embedding

Benefits

  • Content producers collaborate easily and efficiently with workspaces and projects
  • Site layout easy to manage with drag and drop placement
  • Publication consistent with existing business practices
  • Fast time-to-implementation
  • Low cost; high quality

I am the lead intranet developer for Bell Atlantic Mobile, the United States' second largest wireless communications company. We use Zope and its components to provide access to HR data on our intranet and to facilitate other applications. Zope allows for better organization of code, and allows us to focus on coding first. With Zope, apps are developed and debugged quicker and easier, and they run faster than straight CGI. Python and Zope are intelligently designed and solidly built.
- Bill Scherer, Lead Intranet Developer, Verizon Wireless