Content Management System Proof of Concept
[ Technologies > Proof of Concept > Prototype > Pilot > Production ]
Proof of Concept (POC)
This Proof of Concept (POC) project was undertaken as part of our Innovation Lab Services. The project was an important part a larger programme of work to digitise a large corporate library containing thousands of historical newspaper, media clippings, and company annual & interim reports, and make them accessible and searchable via a corporate intranet.
The project was required to confirm technical feasibility of WordPress as a web hosting platform and extensible content management system. WordPress was selected due to its broad usage (65% of Websites with a major content management system and 42% of all websites use WordPress - source: w3techs).
Whilst WordPress showed promise in it’s broad feature set and touted configurability, it was unknown whether it was able to natively provide the technical capabilities to store, index and expose the required elements (including selected metadata and content) and then allow it to be adequately presented via a web-based interface.
Native Content Management deficiencies
Whilst WordPress was found to provide a rudimentary content library, it lacked the native ability to replicate the required document library information architecture (i.e., support for hierarchical folders).
Extensibility gained via third-party plug-in ecosystem
Hierarchical folders - Through further research, several candidate third-party plug-ins were reviewed and later deployed within WordPress to provide a direct mapping of physical folder hierarchies to their equivalent content library storage hierarchies within WordPress. Mapping of the WordPress content library to physical folder structures was of critical importance as each unique file path is generated through RPA and then stored within a custom field of the related PDF file and is used to allow users to download PDF files individually as required.
PDF indexing - WordPress also lacked the ability to natively index PDF file contents and then allow for searching on keywords or combinations of keywords.
Dynamic table filtering - WordPress was unable to present the PDF document library in a table and then allow users to filter that list in situ based on a combination of several fields (e.g., only show documents within the library where ‘country of origin’=’Australia’ AND ‘publisher’=’The Australian’ AND ‘date’ BETWEEN (31-12-1976 AND 31-12-2020). Several third-party add-ins/plug-ins were identified and tested to extend the native WordPress functionality and were found to allow for both PDF indexing/searching and in situ dynamic table filtering.
End Results
This engagement allowed our client to quickly establish a Proof of Concept (POC) in order to confirm core technical functionality of several solution options and feasibility of the intended platform prior to further investment of time and resources.
Update: This POC progressed through to the next stage of our Digital Innovation Labs into Prototyping - see our post about the success of the next stage here.
