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Customer: Symbol Technologies
Problem: FG SQUARED needed a CMS tool for Symbol.
Solution: We created an XML-powered publishing machine.
URL: http://www.symbol.com

Symbol’s web presence at the end of 2004 was enormous. When we first started talking about the scope of the project with FG SQUARED, we ran our spiders on the site and found it to contain at least 8000 content items. And www.symbol.com was only one of various Web sites comprising a whole range of online properties.

Symbol needed to get control of their content. Not everything up on the site still needed to be there, and not everything had been posted with complete authority or oversight by someone in charge. In fact, it was sometimes hard to say who had the final say on what went where on the site.

While FG SQUARED took on the epic task of gathering, prioritizing, and categorizing thousands of content items and working with 40+ stakeholders, the Triple Dogs got busy putting together a system that would stand up to very specific content publishing requirements.

• They needed to define their own content as they went. Today there may be white papers, case studies, and webinars to publish, but tomorrow they may need specialized press releases or support patches.
• They had a variety of content authors scattered across the organization, and not all of them had the privilege to do everything on the site.
• They needed a way to categorize all content inside a taxonomy.
• They needed a preview site and some kind of scheduling mechanism.
• They needed site caching for performance.
• They needed a search engine.
• At some point in the future they needed to integrate all of this content with their other Web properties.
• They needed to revamp the business logic that drove lead generation.
• Because they were a global company, they needed to support as many languages and locales as possible.

The core of our system was a three-part framework: taxonomy manager, which allowed us to create arbitrary category hierarchies to which we could assign any content; a content type manager which allowed content administrators to define content types as they needed them; an XSLT manager that allowed content administrators to assign custom look and feel to any content type.

We felt that of all the pieces of the core framework, the content type manager was the most innovative. By using a simple system of tags saved in an XML file, content administrators could mix and match different components (like headlines, dates, paragraphs, lists, etc) into sections, then mix and match sections into larger content types. Sections and tags could be reused, resulting in the ability to create, for instance, not only a white paper, but a white paper for the German market, or specialty press releases by industry.

To hold everything together, we devised a system of global metadata that was included in every node of the taxonomy and every content item. We were able to track language, locale, title, teaser, launch date, expiration date and other important pieces of information. The system thus had the flexibility of custom metadata held together by a core group of universal metadata.

The XSLT manager allowed content administrators to take these taxonomy and content items and apply the kind of look and feel they needed for a particular context.

Other tools then followed: user administration, scheduler, cache manager, user sandboxes and preview site, and more. UTF-8 support on all admin and display pages was instated from the beginning.

We wrote the tool with PHP 5 and XML, but we found that we needed to incorporate other technologies for performance. Site caching was added to generate flat files after any XSLT or PHP processing. A mySQL database was added to power the search engine and the scheduler, as it was a lot faster than repeated calls to XML files. Both mySQL and Apache caching were put in place to further speed up the site’s performance.

Along the way, we also assisted FG SQUARED by writing dozens of Perl scripts to help munge spreadsheets full of content into working XML. Because the content was in XML, we could also write other Perl scripts to make global changes very quickly across the entire content base.

The new symbol.com was launched in late July 2005. It contained approximately 4500 content items. We trained Symbol’s marketing staff and webmaster on the new system, and continued supporting the site with new upgrades until September 2005.

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