niksilver.com

…which changed in the way we thought about it (and implemented it) a long time after it was released.

Originally any piece of content was designated as being of exactly one type: it was either an article, a video, a competition, and so on. To take the video content as an example, putting a video onto the site involves opening up a video content editor in the CMS, referencing the appropriate asset in the Brightcove system, and adding some video-specific metadata such as its source and preferred display size. Clearly you aren’t going to confuse that with writing an article, which is why it made sense to say that each piece of content was of exactly one type, no more and no less.

But one day one of the editorial staff made an unusual request: she had an article and wanted us to add a checkbox in the article editor marked “Display on video page”. This puzzled the tech team initially — if it was an article then people wanting videos wouldn’t want it to appear on the video page. Also, we were wary about adding a feature which would complicate the article editor but be used by few people. We quickly found the good reason for her request: she was creating an article with an embedded YouTube video, and the purpose of the content really was to showcase the video. Anyone looking for videos on the site would want to find the content, so it should appear on the video page, but the video should remain outside the Guardian CMS, so the video content editor wasn’t appropriate.

We realised this was a general need: content could fall into several categories at once and editorial staff should be able to flag it as such. The solution, then, was not to add a checkbox marked “Display on video page” because that wouldn’t solve the general problem. Instead we took an existing “labelling” facility present in all the content editors, and we extended it allow content-type labels to be added. Of course, we also needed to ensure the system responded to these new labels, but since it was an extension of an existing feature it was a more natural and reliable solution than we might otherwise have implemented.

The end result therefore didn’t introduce any complexity for end-users — no extra buttons or checkboxes — but it did give them the power to do what they wanted.

This is a good example both of how our understanding of apparently-basic questions (”what is video?”) can change with experience, and of how understanding the source of a requirement can lead to better solutions.

…whose structure we worked hard to get right as part of the project. This was an important part of weaving ourselves into the fabric of the web: to ensure our referencing system had a useful structure to those outside our organisation.

Previously our URLs looked like this:

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/tonyblair/story/0,,2075005,00.html

today the same piece of content is referenced like this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/may/10/tonyblair.labour3

There are two obvious changes here. First, the obscure numbers have gone — a legacy of our old Vignette StoryServer software, and utterly useless to anyone who happens to be a human being. Second, we’ve included the date in a friendly format, to provide some sense of orientation, and particularly useful if you happen to be looking at several URLs at a time.

There are other changes, too. The “politics” reference has come out of the domain name and into the path, to reflect the fact that all our content is part of the guardian.co.uk site. A couple of keywords also appear in the URL, partly to convey what the content is about, and partly to distinguish it from any other content that appeared in the same section on the same day. As it happens, quite a lot was written about Tony Blair and Labour on that day, so the “3″ adds a further unique identifier.

In some ways URL structure is an obscure topic, but getting it right opens up access to more of our content in more ways to more people. Further examples have been given by Matt McAlister in his discussion of the RSS feeds.

…which looked like this:

• October 2005: Start detailed planning of Travel section. Involved about 12 people from Guardian and ThoughtWorks. Much preparation needs to take place before work can begin.
• February 2006: Start building the Travel section, initially focusing on the servers, development environment and build pipeline.
• May 2006: Launch first visible item on Travel section, a keyword component.
• November 2006: Launch entire Travel section. From a technical standpoint it was then the biggest single launch in the website’s history, and one of the smoothest then known.
• January 2007: Start planning phase two. Involved around 20 people fulltime for six weeks, but sufficient clarity was achieved after three weeks to start one stream of work then.
• May 2007: Launch new guardian.co.uk home page. Within hours of the launch, Tony Blair obligingly announces his resignation as prime minister, allowing us to make full use of our flexible templates as the story develops throughout the day.
• July 2007: Launch Science, Technology and Environment sections. Included a new feature: series. This allows special navigation back and forth through items in a series such as Bad Science or Nature Notes.
• August 2007: Launch integrated video. Includes reskinned Brightcove player with dynamically-inserted pre-roll advertising.
• October 2007: Launch sections for Business, Society, Media, Money and Guardian America.
• February 2008: Launch Observer, News, and Politics sections, plus integrated audio.
• April 2008: Launch Sport and Football sections. Includes live scores and fixtures, and match facts among other features.
• June 2008: Launch Comment is Free. Includes community features from Pluck.
• August 2008: Launch of Culture, Education and Life & Style sections, plus 14 blogs moving over from the old Movable Type system.
• September 2008. Launch the remaining 21 blogs onto the new platform. Some of these blogs didn’t go in August due to the key part they played in August news events, and some because they were awaiting additional features such as remote working tools.