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Product Overview

Summary

Opus is a Content Management System which lets you publish one or more web sites each of which can include an online newspaper. Each site can have a different look and feel. Sites can have multiple authors. A web front end allows authors to post new articles without any need to learn HTML.

Opus was developed to publish a web site and online newspaper for the village of Milton. A number of other sites have been developed, both by The Hug and by other designers using Opus.

In Depth

Opus lets you run one or more web sites which we call "papers". In the paper the text on each web page is called an "article".

Each paper can be divided into one or more sections and within the sections you can have any number of articles. Each paper has an editor and one or more authors, including the editor. Authors post articles which are stored in the database and retrieved when the paper is read.

Articles come in different shapes and sizes. News articles appear in the site's news section while web articles allow you to add more static content. Database articles are useful for holding more structured information, such as contact directories. Document articles let you put other types of document such as Word and PDF files on your web site, and have them managed and searchable by Opus.

Articles are written via a web form. The text of articles can be plain text so you don't need to understand HTML mark up (although if you do you can use it).

Each news article has a headline followed by the text. Long articles are split automatically after the end of the first paragraph and only the first paragraph will then appear followed by the hotlink "More...".

News articles can be embargoed, so they don't appear in the paper until the date/time specified, and expired, so they disappear after the date/time specified.

News articles can be marked to go in the paper's diary, in which case a date and optionally, start and end times, are specified and it will also appear in a diary section.

Web articles are similar to news articles, but don't appear in the news section of the site. They have a title followed by the text, which again can be plain text or HTML.

Database articles consist of one or more predefined fields. The fields can be single or multi-line text, select pull downs or check boxes.

Document articles have an attached document, usually a PDF or Word document, and can include a headline and text, line a web article, which introduces the document to the reader.

Opus also includes its own search engine.

Opus is designed so that it is easy to customise the look and feel of each paper.

Technical Issues

Opus is written in PHP using a MySQL database back end. Both of these are freely available under the GNU General Public License.

Opus is designed to be useable by people with little or no experience of either PHP or MySQL, although you'll get more out of it if you understand these packages. You also probably need to understand the basics of how to put together a web page and how to write HTML. Although again these aren't vital.

Probably the hardest part of the installation is installing PHP and MySQL, but if you're using an ISP to host your paper this will already be done for you!

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