News CMS
Background
As a fast-evolving company, Dr Foster Intelligence regularly publishes press releases and other news articles on its corporate website. For a long time, these articles were created by hand as static, separate pages. However, it soon became apparent that there were massive efficiencies to be gained by serving the content from a database via a Content Management and Publishing system.
The majority of press release articles were written by the Media department, so the provision of a CMS enabled members of the Media team to assume full control over the creation and editing of the news and publications section of the site, which freed the development team up to concentrate on larger and more complex projects.
How the system works
I built the CMS itself using ASP.NET 2.0 and C#, but the Dr Foster Intelligence website was built in ASP so I modified the news area of the site itself to pull the content in from the database, rather than rebuilding the site in ASP.NET. The model was quite simple, consisting of a summary page and article page, each with an image. If one had been created and uploaded via the CMS, it was also possible to download a pdf of the article for later reading.