CMS Enhancements Required
It seems that content for mobislim requires a couple of enhancements to the CMS. That’s great because we love a bit of development ; )
Development of these two enhancements can now begin as I have informed my wife that I will be working this weekend. In case this is of any help to people like me who speak without thinking, when your wife asks what she is supposed to do whilst you are working, “tidy up the house” is not a good answer. My wife is consequently now not talking to me.
Here’s what we’re adding:
Adding Article Support: To date all the sites we have built have been designed to deliver content such as mobile wallpapers, ringtones, screensavers, themes and videos. However, Bango Bunter has sent a load of text articles for upload. We need our customers to be able to edit assets themselves so we need to have a way for the customer to enter Device Independent Markup into the CMS so we’re enhancing asset description to either take some text, or text provided in some XML. This will allow for the use of styleclasses on divs , for XHTML compatible devices, and for the align attribute, which can be used on paragraphs on wml / chtml devices.
Adding Tracking Options: Since the main point of mobislim is to test out mobile tracking and analytics, we need to test out the various ways in which pages and assets can be tracked. There are 2 main types of tracking we are adding. We are adding support for indiviudal assets, so that an individual asset can be linked to a bango number. This is kind of a regression from the use of the bango relay, however we are putting it in so that we can compare the various ways in which different types of users might deploy tracking into their applications. The excting bit is that there is a new API coming out which will support page tracking with dynamic bango number creation. This means that if we have a view-article page, which displays an article asset, all we need to do is pass the asset id and any bango number in the package we are using for a project to bango, and it will automatically create a new bango number for tracking the hits on this particular article. This is super cool. We are creating a <tt:bango-tracking/> custom tag, which takes attributes required to control the bango api it talks to. This tag is tightly interwoven with our cms so that it gives site administrators as much control over tracking as possible with the greatest ease. I’m also toying with the idea of creating an open source version of our tag, which is more general and which will just let people drop it into their JSP’s so that they can add mobile tracking to their site, regardless of the CMS they are using. (Well, as long as they’re using Java anyway ; )