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Energy UK

energy-uk.org.uk

Customer Profile:

Energy UK was set up to represent Britain's gas and electricity industry in the media and with key stakeholders including government, consumer organisations and charities.

Initial requirements:

We were invited to improve the workflow of the current CMS and simplify the process so that it would become easy for non-technical staff to manage. The initial idear was to automate the menus and layout based on an agreed structure.

Menu system

Problem:

1Joomla allows the site administrator to create articles on the fly.  However, the setup of a new page (assignment of the menus and modules) requires a good working understanding of the system. Our brief was to simplify this process and therefore developed the following solutions for Energy UK.

Solution:

In reply, we created a bespoke system which is capable of creating menus based upon the content structure of the site. This works by shadowing the behavior of each content item and building the relevant menus upon the following rules:

a) When an article is created the system will automatically setup a menu item in the correct menu location;
b) If an article is moved from one category to another the menu linking to the article will copy and publish itself to the correct corresponding menu;
c) If the article is deleted or unpublished the menu item will remove or unpublish itself automatically from the Joomla's menu manager. 

This was done to ensure that menus could be entirely managed within the variables of the site and to ensure that a broken 404 link would not occur within the auto menu system. The system also allows for menus to be managed in the standard Joomla way which was essential as certain setups across the site requires a different setup and configuration.

 Problem:

2Due to automating the menu management there needed to be some system in place which would allow us to control the behavior of  menus in different instances across the site. Adding to this Energy UK needed Sections and Categories to work and display as Articles when leading from their left menu, while in other scenarios Categories and Sections were to be displayed in an entirely different way.

Solution :

We created a collection of four rules which allowed us to configure the layout and behaviors of each menu. These rules are configurable in the menu module’s parameters which gives greater control over how each menu works across the site:

Rule 1) if there is no content in the selected Section, display the first Category, while keeping the Section menu item active;
Rule 2) if there is no content in the selected Category, display the first Article, while keeping the Category menu item active;
Rule 3) if there is only ‘one’ Article in a selected Category, hide the Category menu item and display ‘Article menu item;
Rule 4) if there is only one category in the menu then hide it and only display it's children.

This allows the Energy UK site to handle the complex task of managing these menu in a very simple automated manor, which interns allows Articles, Categories and Sections to display themselves as a top level menu items or in a tree hierarchy depending upon the population of the content structure of the site.

 

content  construction and layouts

Problem:

3Energy UK needed a non-technical way of improving the workflow on their current CMS. The brief also required four different types of features which needed to work along side each content item or Article. This was: 1) preview images, 2) play videos, 3) related article box and 4) social bookmark links. Please see the image below:

 

The standard approach would be to manage these features in modules.  However, this would have required each of the four features to be managed separately, all of which would have needed to be assigned to each article separately in different variations. Due to the amount of content in the site, the logistics of this would have made the site very complicated to manage.

Solution:

J Refactored - which is our in-house framework, allows us to keep the internal structure of Joomla while changing its external behavior. In this scenario it was used to intercept all of Joomla's content views and used later on other 3rd parties application such as jDownloads and AcyMailing. This allowed us to custom tailor the back and front content layouts. We also used it to refactor Joomla's Section, Category and Article manager to improve the layout and workflow of the system with specially made editing regions. This incorporation meant that the staff did not have to be retrained on how to use the system.  This included the media player, image upload and cropping, and the ability to add related links which other wise would not be possible. Please see the image below:

In essence this allowed us to go beyond the limitations of Joomla to provide Energy UK with an enterprise solution which dramatically improved the workflow and the daily usability of the system.

 

Publications

Problem:

 4Energy UK needed a smart way of managing and organising their online publications. We looked at a few document management systems however, none of them had an automated solution for presenting or packaging files online. In essence these applications were built on the presumption that the site publisher or administrator had the tools available to manually convert and articles to PDFs and the graphic design skills to present these documents as presentations.  Lastly, as Energy UK is the primary representative for Britain's gas and electricity companies there needed to be a solution available by which their PDF publications were searchable.

 Solution:

We decided to use jDownloads as a based application as we recognised it to be the best solution available on the market. We used our in-house framework to refactor jDownloads to incorporate some unique and special features which worked to automate the entire process of uploading and presenting these files on line.

This included:

a) The ability to convert Joomla article to PDF’s
After researching in to this matter we decided upon using a server side application which does a superior job of converting html web content to PDF’s over the default Joomla solution. The HTML code including the styles and links used in the article is then converted to a PDF and published to jDownloads on the fly. To ensure that the output of the document displays correctly we develop a PDF template which the html was passed into. This all happens upon selecting a Joomla article and saving the Publication.

b) The ability to search the content of PDF files
In order to make the document searchable we developed a system which would index the PDF document. To do this we created a solution which reads the document and then writes a searchable text file from the content of the PDF. This file is then associated to the PDF which is used by the Publication search engine to find the PDF document.

c)  The ability to create a snap-shot icon of the PDF
Lastly we developed a bespoke tool which takes a  snap-shot of the PDF file when it is uploaded or when an article is converted to a PDF. The system then automatically uses the image snapshot for presenting the publication on the website.

 

The end result is that the system is capable of created and presenting a publication entirely by itself. For an example: if and when the administrator chooses to upload a file, the system will automatically use the file name for the publication title, automatically takes an image snapshot of the PDF and crops it for the presentation of the document, automatically reads the document and creates a searchable text file for the Publication Search Engine.

 

Newsletter

Problem:

5The brief was to build a number of HTML newsletter templates, which could be sent either using Energy UK’s existing Campaign Monitor account or through the website. These newsletters was to be sent to targets MPs and their staff, stakeholders and the media, containing important updates and news from the energy sector.

After an initial consultation we agreed to develop a system that could monitor and send out newsletters via the website. This had a great advantage over an external Campaign Monitor tool as the content on the site could easily be used to auto populate newsletters. The other important issues was to improve the usability and workflow of the newsletter system.

Solution:

We used AcyMailing (which is an leading email marketing application for Joomla) and used our own in-house framework (J Refactored) to refactor the backend administrator and newsletter templates. To improve the workflow we created several bespoke admin templates and divided up the newsletter into different editable regions. These regions become active by double clicking with the mouse and work to improve the usability and works to minimises user errors. Please see the image below:

 

We then developed a way in which the administrator could either manually add content or choose to auto populate the newsletter by selecting an article to import. When this happens the article text, image and related links are automatically used to populate the newsletter, this works in the following way:-

a.) The text content is imported from the left content column of an article,
b.) While the image for the newsletter story is automatically imported from the right column,
c.) Lastly, the ‘Releated Article links’ is then used to auto populate the ‘related articles links’ in the newsletter.

 To preview this please click on the image below:-

Prior to being sent the system runs the newsletter through an html parser which transforms the newsletter document to the desired output. This transforms any website typography that uses an external style-sheet to inline styles that will work inside of the newsletter code. Please see the image below:

 

Publications newsletter

Problem:

6

The Newsletter was further extended to support the Publications section which is managed by 3rd party application called ‘jDownloads’. The problem was that the content structure of this application was build to manage and store electronic documents and therefore did not fit the article based Newsletter system.
 

Solution:

In reply, we built a newsletter template specially to manage these publications. It worked by adding the Latest publication first, followed by 3 recently added Publication’s. This follows the same princable as the article based newsletter with 3 diffrent rules:-

a) The latest newsletter publication title is imported from the publication title.
b) Latest newsletter publication Image is imported from the publication preview or PDF image.
c) The same principles have been adopted for all three of the ‘Recent publications’.

To view how this works please see the image below:

Auto newsletter

 

Solution:

The system was then further developed to automatically generate and send newsletters by looking for newly created or modified articles and publications with in the Joomla database. It does this based upon time-based scheduler which looks out for newly created or modified articles within 8 categories on the site. If and when this happens the article or publications is queued and will later be transformed by our html parser into a newsletter. Please see the image below:

This happens on a daily interval which means that non technical staffs do not even need to worry about managing this part of the business, as the system is capable of detecting and sending emails without human intervention.