Daily Content Import (DCI)
Ellington CMS will support a variety of content production environments impacted greatly by staff size, current pain points and/or desired workflow processes.
There are a couple of options to consider while evaluating Ellington CMS and how it will improve the current and/or desired content production environment. One option is to produce content manually on a daily basis within the Ellington Story object within the admin. Some of the finest newsrooms in the country prefer Manual Content Production (MCP) because of the level of control it provides to them.
Another option is to use a combination of the Ellington Daily Content Importer (DCI) and manual production of content once it has been imported into the system.
Getting Story Content into Ellington
Ellington’s Daily Content Importer (DCI) may be used at any point during or after implementation to support a seamless publishing workflow from print-to-web. The Ellington DCI is a script built to import Story content and attributes from a commercial print publishing system, such as Saxotech, Mediaspan, Baseview, and ALS. The following prerequisites must be met in order for the DCI to be utilized:
- Client must validate XML with the NITF Validator tool located here
- Data has been formatted to meet Ellington Standard NITF specifications
- Data files include data for the following Required fields within the Ellington Story Object:
- Headline
- Slug
- Tease paragraph
- If no tease is exported, the recommendation is to use the first paragraph of the story.
- Body copy
- Publication date & time
- Story status
- DCI default status is “Draft” and can be changed to “Live” within the Ellington Admin after the content has been imported.
- As an alternative, and for seamless print-to-web publishing, it is recommended that status be set to “Live” upon importing.
- Categories
- DCI will support categorizing a Story to up to 3 categories (1 parent and 2 child categories)
- Story comments status
- DCI default status for story comments is to be “Enabled.”
- As an alternative, status upon import may be changed to:
- Disabled: Comments will not be displayed for the stories upon import.
- Verified: Comments will be enabled for stories upon import; however, only ‘verified’ site users may comment.
Other non-required but supported DCI fields in the Story object include:
- Print headline
- Sub-headline
- Byline (one author supported)
- Related media object(s)
- DCI will support pointing to media files in the media folder on designated server, which will effectively publish the story and its related media online.
- In this case, the imported media objects do not live in the Ellington database and therefore will require manual entering after the objects have been imported.
Our Flexible Story Controls
In addition to using the DCI to import basic Story content into Ellington, there are a number of other controls/fields within the Story object admin that will further improve the database quality of imported Story content with just a few simple clicks. Specifically, here is a list of the additional controls/fields available to a content producer via the Story object admin:
- One-off Byline
- Dateline
- Inline embedment of related media
- Pre-story blurb Post-story blub
- Tease photo
- Lead photo
- Designate if Lead photo has a headline
- Updated date and time
- Multiple website selection to cross-publish content
- Default framing for the story
- Page and Section location in print edition
- Categories (unlimited selection of categories)
- Custom meta-data
- Set story priority level
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