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I'm in the News

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Ok, I might not "actually" be in the news, but I have been commissioned to build a news site with all the bells and whistles that one might expect from a major online publication. This particular project has some really interesting and unique aspects to it that immediately got my creative mind working. Like anyone when you decide to become a freelancer, you're painfully aware that you're only as good as the last paying project. So if this puppy fails, I probably wont see any additional revenue from them, nor will I have the chance to explore exciting new projects. But, the current project is something that I think i can turn into something very cool and hit every one of their requirements on the head. In addition to that there are some bonuses that I can throw in to make sure they are setup for enhancements in the future.

Below is the initial list of requirements for the news CMS:

• Multiple Authors
• Intro, Full Article, Published Date, Author, Relative links, Tags, Categories, Images....
• Thumbnail generation
• Commenting
• Polling, with live feedback
• User Account, profile bookmarking
• Archives
• Breaking News
• Edition Based
• Preview

As you can see this is pretty standard stuff. Basically they want the ability to produce articles and then assign those article to an edition for publishing. Once an edition is ready to roll, they want the ability to set it up and have the system automatically recognize the date and start showing that edition when appropriate. I think of this a time deployment. Currently when they want to roll an edition, they roll the next days morning news at 4:00 pm the prior day. Which means the news is never hitting the viewing audience when it should. Having the ability to publish the news in a timely manner is a huge upgrade to the current user base. Making the site more dynamic is also a huge upgrade for them. Currently everything is built in Dreamweaver, and then pushed to the live webserver. There are pieces that are dynamic, and there is a lightweight CMS behind it, but there is no real interaction with the database other than producing some small pieces of html. My solution for them is going to be, of course Django based. But this time I'm going to need to rebrand the OOTB admin and brand it more for the company. Although things that come out of the box are nice, we are going to need to do a few things different. I will also need to write additional jQuery pieces for the live website. So as you can see I'm very excited to have yet another new client, and the ability to work on a project that's exciting. For those of you wondering, yes this client did find me because of this blog. Believe it or not, writing has helped me with the last two clients, but even more importantly it was the follow up that lead me to signing the contract. I'll have more posts on freelancing later, but I truly want to thank my readers for either point people here, or spreading the word around. I OWE YOU ONE!

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