By Master
Robin Gallowglass, OP
© 2007-2008 David L. Weiner
This article is a first attempt to describe for the College of Arms the thought processes, reasoning, and future directions of the online article management system known as FELIX.
FELIX (Flexible Education Library Information eXchange) is a partially automated system to manage and mirror educational articles from a primary source location to the Laurel Website. FELIX was conceived as a means to address previous short comings that caused a number of authors to request the removal of their articles from the Laurel Website.
The following shortcomings were identified and will be examined below:
Changes to the original layout of an article.
Each article was added to the Laurel Website by hand in a time consuming process.
Article Freshness.
Changes to the original layout of an article -- Each article was added to the Laurel Website by hand. This can be a very time consuming process, especially for longer articles, as the site navigation and style elements had to be added to every page. Often during the process, the layout of the original article was changed in a fashion that was undesirable to the author. This was one of the more common complaints made about articles hosted on the Laurel Website.
Article Freshness -- It was often a lengthy and frustrating process for an author to get their article updated on the Laurel Website, often due to the time consuming process of adding additional articles.
Herrin Gisela vom Kreuzbach, the Laurel Education Deputy at this time, had a strong desire to solve these problems and convince authors of often used articles to return their articles to the Laurel Website. This could significantly reduce the number of pages that would have to be included with a name submission, per Appendix H of the Admin Handbook. Gisela discussed the issues with myself and Lord Tanzos Istvan and FELIX was born.
From the group discussion, the following design goals emerged:
Ease of use for both the administrator and the website visitor.
Automate as much as possible to eliminate adding articles by hand.
Be proactive in maintaining article freshness.
Allow the authors to easily update their own articles.
Preserve as much of the formating of the original article as possible.
The decision was made to use a database to store the articles, as this would enable us to easily meet all of our design goals in a timely fashion.
Ease of use for the article administrator goes hand in hand with automating as much as possible. By creating a password protected administration area of the website, article administrators can log in, select an author, enter the URL and title of the article and click a button on the form. Once the form is submitted, the server attempts to retrieve the article from the URL that was entered. If the server was able to retrieve the article, the body of the article is stored in the database, along with the original URL, the date and time that it was added, the date and time the article was last modified according to the remote server, the article title, the author and where it will show up on the website. Once that is done, the article body will be scanned for links to subsidiary (or "child") pages, which in turn will be scanned for links as well. If any possible subsidiary links are found, a list is presented to the administrator to select which of the subsidiary pages should also be imported.
Ease of use for the website visitor will be addressed by the creation of a template that will be used to "wrap" each article. if the server believes an article may be out of date, at the top of the article there will be a notice of this along with a request that the visitor notify Codex Herald. While the freshness of each article will be automatically checked on a daily basis by the server, programs can fail, and it was decided that it was better to notify as many people of possible if there was any question about an articles freshness. At the bottom of the article, the date and time of when the article was first added to the database will be shown, as well as the date and time that it was last updated, the source URL and the date and time the article located at the source URL was last modified.
Automation was briefly discussed earlier, but it doesn't stop there and works hand in hand in with being proactive about maintaining article freshness. Once a day, the server will check the freshness of each and every article in the database and email a list of out of date articles to myself and Gisela. We will be able to log in to the administrative section of the website, verify that an article is truly out of date (and not, say defaced by hackers) and update the copy of the article on the Laurel website, all with a few clicks of the mouse. At no time will an article be automatically updated without first being verified by a live person, because web site defacement is a very real possibility in this day and age.
Each author will also be able to log in to the administration section of the website, but will not be able to import any new articles and may only update their own articles or remove them from the website. This is by no means required. If an author does not wish to take advantage of this feature, they will not be required to. However, this does give the author full control over their articles and a safety net if the website staff is unresponsive.
A common complaint heard from authors was that the formating of their articles were significantly changed when they were added to the website. As part of the ease of use and automation design goals, it was determined that we did not want an article administrator editing any HTML, which dovetailed nicely with the goal of preserving as much of the original formating as possible. The only changes that will be made will be the addition of the article footer, the page background and applying the Laurel website style sheet to the text and any links. No other changes will be made.
At the time this article was written (April of 2007), FELIX is about ready to leave the ALPHA testing stage and enter BETA testing. We have contacted a few authors and described FELIX in depth to them and they have agreed to allow their articles to return to the website once FELIX is in production and have graciously given us a list of article URLs to use for our testing. If you are an author and would like for your articles to be featured on the Laurel Website or have questions about articles, you may contact Herrin Gisela vom Kreuzbach at education@heraldry.sca.org. If you would like further technical information or have any technical questions, you may contact me at codex@heraldry.sca.org.
UPDATE: On April 7, 2008, http://heraldry.sca.org/ went live, becoming the preferred URL for the College of Arms, taking over for http://www.sca.org/heraldry/. At that time, the public facing side of FELIX was put into place and is currently managing approximately 35 articles on the website. The administration tools are still being worked on.