About the System

The News Release System is a web-based, database driven, content management system. It consists of four basic parts:

1. Administrative System. This system is used by the administrators of the news releases as well as the publishers of the content. This allows new articles to be added, edited, and organized within the system. As a designer, this part of the system is not something you have to worry about and since content is immediately available to you as soon as it's published.
   
2. Content Management System. This is the core of the News Releases System and it consists of a MySQL database which stores the content and PHP and Perl scripts that access the content, retrieve specific sets of content, and dictates how it is displayed.
   
   The Content Management scripts are:
   
   • generic.pl: http://www.bu.edu/phpbin/news/releases/generic.pl
     • Embeds a list of titles of articles chronologically from most recent to oldest into your page. Clicking on the title will display the article.
     • Allows you to select sets of releases by college or category, and will display any number of article titles you select when incorporating this script.
       
   • results.php: http://www.bu.edu/phpbin/news/releases/results.php
     • Displays lists of titles of articles chronologically from most recent to oldest. Clicking on the title will display the article.
     • Allows you to select sets of releases by college, category, year, month, or by a particular keyword.
     • Allows you to narrow the set of releases you want to display if you select multiple selectors, i.e. selecting college and keyword will select the news releases from the specified college containing the keyword.
       
   • display.php: http://www.bu.edu/phpbin/news/releases/display.php
     • Displays a single news release article.
     • Selects the article by an arbitrary id number.
       
3. Templates. This is what you, the designer, host in your website. The templates are a set of HTML pages that contain specific code that the Content Management System uses to display the news with your design. These templates allow for different display options in serving the news.
   
   The templates you host are:
   
   • results.html
     • Formats lists of titles of news releases and returns specific sets of results based on a search or by criterion selected in your links.
     • Used in creating links to sets of releases.
       
   • display.html
     • Provides the basic design framework in which a single news release is displayed.
       
   • templ.html
     • Controls how titles of articles are displayed when the releases are embedded in a page.
       
4. Links and Includes. In the pages of your site that present the news, you create simple HTML links or Server Side Includes (SSI) that dictate how the visitor will finally see the news. These links and includes tell the Content Management System which articles to access, how to display them, and that you want to use your templates to give your pages the look and feel of you site.
   
   Embedding the news refers to incorporating dynamic content into a preexistent page inside the body of the page, in a section (as in a cell of a table), or in a sidebar.
   
   Linking to the news refers to creating hyperlinks that command the scripts to display news content in a new page by putting the content into a shell based on your design.