Problems

The Problem(s)

This is NOT simply an attempt to make a nicer Admin UI for our publishing system, It is an ongoing attempt to re-organize the publishing system to improve work flow and support the constantly changing needs of various groups within PLOS. This is necessary to support the growing publishing demand as well as the desire of other groups within PLOS to publish on our site. Now that Ambra Administration is a separate web application we can address long standing issues that plague Production, Editorial and Marketing. These issues hamper efforts to effectively handle increasing article volume, rapid and convenient updating of static content and delivery of subscription emails.

• Duplication effort ingesting of articles on stage, then production.
• Brittle scripts that automate the process
• Inability to make minor changes or add assets to articles without ingesting the entire article.
• Production is forced to edit Free marker templates for simple landing page edits.
• No coherent methods for creating and deploying static text blocks or pages.
• Templating is static.
• Awkward Volume and Issue creation and updating of text and images associated with issues.
• Cannot easily change the order of issues within a volume.
• Process is duplicated on stage and live.
• Image article files are created using a tool but still need to go through an ingestion process.
• Lack of accessible "golden corpus" for Production and Developers.
• Developers/Testing often need staged/live articles to investigate issues.
• Articles are treated as static entitiies.
• Article changes during production are not tracked.
• PLOS created static content needs a version control system.
• Coherent process for adding corrections or additional assets. Entire articles are ingested as zips.
• Currently formal corrections are handled as annotations and transformed into and article format for delivery to PMC. (Create/Save them in the format deliverable to PMC)
• Adding additional content associated with an article after publication.
• Having only one role (Admin) prevents having a UI designed for specific tasks such as Editorial.
• PLOS unnecessarily modifies the original XML, forcing additional work if article is corrected.
• No tools to verify version of articles on servers.
• Automated method of ingestion lacks coherent error reporting.
• Need input validation and reporting ingesting errors.
• Original version of defective article is not retained in the system.
• UI Problems (were should I start?)
• UI should support per journal views as well as entire corpus views or articles.
• Does not handle long list of articles well. i.e. long pages - inability to search for specific articles * etc.
• UI should tailor view appropriate for different roles i.e. some roles should not be able to delete articles or mess with cache.
• UI needs to be more workflow centric
• Cannot update/delete annotations.
• I'm tired.
• UI should be extensible as additional API are brought on line.
• User profile CRUD.
• No consistent/simple API available for automation, status and general access to articles other than by adding actions to Ambra.
• Admin does not support task scheduling.
• Authors cannot see the article before publication.

Should we start talking about Hubs (enough said)