Synergy

1
Synergy

• Simple Content Management

2
Content Management Today

• Small organizations need tools to manage online
  content
• Departmental control of content
• Consistent professional appearance
• Distributed Content ? Distributed Mess
• Navigation is often inconsistent
• Formatting and layout varies within many sites
• Web updates are often bottlenecked

3
www.cs.ucsb.edu
4
Synergy Goals

• Distribute web updates, but keep it simple
• Tools mirror familiar applications
• Document version recovery
• Templates keep the web site consistent
• Group-based security sections the web site
• Flexible system internals
• Database independent
• Web server independent

5
Why Synergy?

• Fundamentally, we want to shift the web
  development paradigm
• Markup Language ? Web Document

lthtmlgt ltbodygt ltpgtltbgt ltspan style'font-size18.0pt
font-familyGeorgia'gt First paragraph is
here.lt/spangt lt/bgtlt/pgt ltpgtlt/pgt ltpgtltigtltugt ltspan
style'font-size12.0pt'gt Second paragraph is
here.lt/spangt lt/ugtlt/igtlt/pgt lt/bodygt lt/htmlgt
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Inside Synergy
Original Design
7
Inside Synergy
Current
8
Behind the Scenes
9
Demo

• Highlights
• Distributed content development
• Templates enforce professional appearance
• Simple interface allows all users to contribute
• Shields system admin from web tasks
• Access to site can be restricted without admins
  help
• Editing staged www.cs.ucsb.edu

10
Milestones

• Actual
• System Design ?
• DatabaseProvider, SecurityManager ?
• SiteManager, VersionController ?
• ConnectionManager, SynergyClient (GUI) ?
• PublishAgent (Changed to SSH) ?
• Staging WWW Server (Changed to Local Preview)
• SynergyAdmin ?
• Test, Test, Test ?

11
Lessons Learned

• Approaching a well-known problem is hard
• E.g. Image handling painful, but expected to be
  perfect
• Need for simplicity is difficult to convey
• User experience is the most important in the end
• Architecture design is crucial
• Our layered approach saved us in many ways
• Dont overlook design
• 3 different designs sequence charts, UML, and
  many brainstorming sessions before we started
  coding

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Lessons Learned

• Pay attention to Design Patterns
• Command Pattern made our lives much easier
• Design is only as good as the implementation
• We wrote the network code once. It never changed.
• Database table structure is not abstracted enough
• MS Access is great as a development database
• Aided coding tremendously, but wont scale
• Milestones often took twice the time expected

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Next Quarter

• Refine the User Interface
• Template editing capability
• Allow for partial content publishing
• Maintain tree state per user
• CSS and table support in editor
• Create user interface for the server
• Define publish locations and other server
  settings
• Allow server to run as a Windows Service
• Database backup/restore interface

14
Next Quarter

• Setup wizard for initial install/configuration
• Redo database abstraction
• DatabaseBridge for alternate database
• Link Checking User Interface
• Provide client with feedback during process
• Web Client Interface (?)
• Lose some simplicity/functionality
• Probably necessary for academic adoption
• Introduces cross browser issues

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Questions?