International infoportal GrandInform

International infoportal GrandInform

Portal GrandInform provides information and services in different languages for many countries and regions.

Currently implemented only basic services, such as blogosphere, newspaper and a system for publishing classified ads.

All services are integrated in a common environment, creating the impression of a single application that facilitates the user to work on the portal.

With the development of the portal is supposed to create new modules, such as a shop, a freelance service for standard tasks or other, original modules, that are not in the market.

Currently there are installed modules for 4 countries (highlighted in color). However, in the process of localization of software, can be installed more countries and languages.

Modular structure of the portal

The modular structure is also good for technical reasons, since enables organically divide the area of responsibility for members of a development team, simplifies design and installation of new modules.

Technically, all modules are separate web applications in terminology J2EE. However, modules can be created on the basis of other, basic modules, adding to them additional pages or without any additions. So, for example, each country is a module, comprising a bulletin board and newspaper, but connected to a separate, for each country, database. Each such country can have other, original services, specific for the particular country.

The portal has a modular structure that allows its further development without effect of "patchwork". All modules fall into one pattern, consisting of the head, upper and lower menus, right and left margins for en additional information and/or advert banners. The presence of a single menu creates an effect of the "regular" application. In my opinion, it provides a more intuitive, and familiar environment, reducing of time to adapt the user to the new portal.

Territorial devision

Services like classified ads and newspapers require the division of an information on the territorial basis, others, on the contrary, such as blogosphere, have a global character.

The portal supports the division by countries and by regions where it is needed, and makes it possible to create modules aimed for a global audience, harmoniously combining the two approaches.

The ability to strictly separate an information by the country is particularly good for the implementation of a shop module, since the laws of economic activity in different countries are different. Having a common “core” for the shop and complementing it by specific, to each country characteristics, you can, having a single code in the “core” shop module with small additions, cover the whole world with a virtual trading network. In a result, each country will have a separate shop, with its database, which can be leased to the local operator. In this case, however, everything will look as if there is only one shop for the entire portal.

Portal is multilingual

Support of many languages on a portal GrandInform doesn't mean a simple translation of buttons and interface messages into several languages. It also needs for the publications.

Each country is operating basically just by one or several languages, while the blogosphere requires support as many languages as possible.

This contradiction is taken into account during creating the portal.

Although currently is supported only three languages, the portal is designed for the use of tens or even hundreds of languages. If, for a blog, you can choose several languages from the entire list, in order to write an article in the newspaper or place an ad, you can select only those languages, which are rigidly established as languages for the country of publication.

Moreover being in a single publication, you can write in several languages(in different input fields), and the reader will only see the version of your publication, which corresponds to the selected language to him.

The portal can be adjusted on-line

If you need to quickly add a new column in the newspaper, an advert category in the bulletin board or create an additional region, you can do it on-line on special pages, available only to administrators. You can also set your advertising banners and moderators for rubrics/categories or for the entire service.

Hard setting up at the software level is required, however, for the installation of a new country, as it requires the generation of a new database and a new web application module. Fortunately, this operation does not require much time. Main labor for the installation of a new country are associated with mechanical translation to other languages names of GUI elements, messages and some text objects in the database.

Message system and notifications

A message system of the portal is very basic at the present. There are implemented folders, to store sent messages, a simple address book and notifications of new messages to an external e-mail address of the user.

In addition there is an ability to subscribe for notifications by e-mail on such events as a new article in the blog of interest, new comment for any article in the blog, and new comment on a separate article in the newspaper or blog.

The blogosphere

Blogosphere of the portal GrandInform is made alike the newspaper, and it is both a collection of blogs as well as a set of articles from user's blogs, divided by themes.

Therefore, access to the user's blogs is done in different ways. It is either directly through the list of blogs, accessible using search string (1), or through links to the blog's articles (2) on the main page of the blogosphere, or through links to the "themes" of the blogosphere (3), leading to a thematic ribbon of articles from all blogs in the chronological order.

Each blog may contains several dozens of themes defined by the user, where he writes his notes. If these themes match preset "common" themes of the blogosphere, these notes fall on the front page of the blogosphere, as shown in the image.

The Blog

GrandInform portal supports two types of blogs: personal and corporate.

Corporate blog differs from the personal by ability to define other users with write permission into this blog. Each user can have two different types of blogs.

Blogs are multilingual.

During creating a blog, user can define up to three languages for blogging. It means that articles of the blog can have multiple text sections, but one set of attributes and images.

When other users read such multilingual blog, is available only one version of an article's text, which corresponds to the current language, selected by the reader of the blog.

The possibility to customize the appearance of the blog is limited by several options, which makes reading of blogs in the "ribbon" more comfortable, without creating a discomfort when moving from one blog to another. Now, there are variants with vertical or horizontal alignments of topics, with hidden topics, as well as with an alignment of articles by tiles, distributed over the entire width of the screen, or with an alignment to a line.

The newspaper

Newspaper of the portal is multilingual and supports a large number of countries and regions.

Home page of the newspaper includes a lot of information of various types: headings of regional press (1), available after selecting a region, headings for the country (2) and blogosphere's blocks (3) for the relevant topics.

Headings can be of two types: for free publications and "editorials" - "read only", with the write permission, given to the editor.

Publications fall into the main page of the newspaper in the chronological order without any editing.

There is also possible to place an advertising banner at the top of the newspaper under the menu bar. Each country may have a separate banner, or default one, for the whole country.

Rubrics of newspaper

Rubrics are accessible from the main page of the newspaper by a click.

Each rubric can have an ad banner at the left top corner of the screen. The banner can be as separate for each rubric so and the default one, for the entire newspaper.

In addition, is possible to assign the owner for rubrics with the right to set up an ad banner and to configure subtopics. By this way you can lend rubrics for rent.

For the ease of reading on a big screens, articles of rubrics are tiled to fill all available space. You can search for content, have a quick view of the data of the publisher, and press a button to open a message dialog to the author.

The bulletin board

A large number of categories and regions, good search capabilities and multilingual - main features of a bulletin boards on the portal GrandInform.

Like in the case of newspaper, every country has its own bulletin board. And like a newspaper, the bulletin board can have both regional and global ad categories. A country may have as just one or both types of categories simultaneously.

An important feature of a bulletin board it's the presence of the search criteria sets - separately for each category. When placing an ad, the user fills in preset criteria(characteristics) of an ad subject. These criteria will then be used by other users for the search for ads on the board.

The search criteria are adjusted on-line, during the operation of the portal, on special pages available to administrators.

On a front-page of the board is possible also to set up an system advertising banner, under the menu bar.

Categories of bulletin board

Categories of the bulletin board support, at the present, the publication of the two types of ads: with picture and without.

Published ads are placed tiles, distributed over the entire width of the screen.

User can search for the content, do sorting and use an advanced search in the form of expandable area, shown in the picture in yellow.

Announcements are published on a temporary basis and are automatically deleted at the end of the publication.

If a country has several working languages, then submitting an ad, the user has the opportunity to write several versions of the text - own for each language.

Each category can has a system advertisement banner. It can be separate banner for the category or the “default" banner for the bulletin board.

Publications

Currently, there are several kinds of publications: ads, notes in blogs or in the newspaper and comments.

For publications in the newspaper or blog there is a simple, cross-browser WYSIWYG editor.

For publications into the bulletin board is used a plain text input box, and pictures are available for the showing through a pop-up dialogue.

The portal can also successfully work without JavaScript. In this case, the WYSIWYG editor is not available, but the user can still insert a valid markup in the text using HTML tags, including the insertion of uploaded images. Copyright section of an editor window allows you to specify conditions of reprinting own materials and allows to reprint materials which belongs to others, indicating the necessary details of en external rightholder, such as a hyperlink, the name, and the type of license.

Comments and ratings

User can comment articles of blogs and newspaper only. Ads can't be commented.

There is a possibility to comment the comments.

In the case of a large number of comments for the article they are divided by pages.

It is possible to delete the last comment in the ribbon or cross out the intermediate. Comments can be also deleted by moderator...

The reader can change the rating/rank of articles, showing its attitude. Login is not necessary for voting. To prevent "cheating" of rating, is taken into account the fact of the vote, although this mechanism can not be implemented by a reliable way without logging. Ratings are, therefore, indicative. Comments, on the contrary, are only possible after login, that would reduce the likelihood of "trolling".

Other features

There is still quite a large number of pages and portal properties that are not described in this presentation. It is a user registration system, user profile form, login form, with the password reminder, user card - to quickly view the user profile (a button to show user card is in each user's publication), a form for visibility settings of user profile fields, forms for settings of blogs, list of users, with the ability to perform certain operations on the set of users (mostly for the moderator or administrator), and others.

Also there is the possibility of feedback: You can contact the site administrator, or write a letter to moderator for a specific category or rubric. In addition, each country/module can have its own set of administrators/moderators. An important feature of the portal is its ability to work without JavaScript while keeping almost all of his functionality. There are users who prefer, for security reasons, to disable JavaScript. Portal is comfortable enough for them too.

The portal has the "Site Map" in two versions: the traditional visual - for viewing by the user and by old search robots, and special, just for search engines via Sitemap protocol, which is necessary for normal indexing pages.

Technical properties and others

The portal has a modular structure. Each module is a separate web application, in the terminology of J2EE. Because J2EE applications are isolated from each other and require their own authentication, there is used SSO for user login (Single Sign-On). The portal was designed taking into account an ability to install it on a pool of servers to increase performance, by using cluster features of J2EE application servers.

The web interface of the program is done using JSF 2.0, RESTful web services with JSON, AJAX, YUI JavaScrypt library. On the server side is used JPA based on Hibernate to access the database (MySql) and JMS for asynchronous calls. Currently, the portal uses GlassFish as a J2EE container and installed on a Linux system (Fedora).

All software from third-parties are licensed as Open Source.

Description of the portal in this presentation may not reflect the actual characteristics of the portal at the moment.

Copyright© 2014 Vadims Zemlanojs