Joseph DeVore's Blog: Qwest

One of the best projects that I've worked on so far is the Qwest.com Press Release tool. I had the chance to completely architect (using OmniGraffle and customer requirements), code (using Fusebox 5, ColdFusion, CSS, JavaScript/AJAX, Prototype JSFW, XML, SQL in Eclipse, CFEclipse, Navicat and Smultron), graphically design (Photoshop) and deploy to the staging and production servers.

Qwest was using Vignette Server for their PR tool and it worked for a long time, but it had many limitations and they outgrew it. The Vignette tool had over 12 years of legacy PR data that was stored in a ton of CSV and XML files that I had to figure out how to migrate to the new system. I wrote a custom parser to relate the CSV and XML files, parse the data from the XML, scrub it and store it in a MySQL database.

The application also has an RSS feed generator that displays all of the top 100 latest press releases. Each individual press release also has an RSS feed and link for global syndication and search engine optimization.

The Intranet based portion of this application connects to Qwest's Active Directory Servers using LDAP to authenticate users using their SSO (single sign-on). The application uses a role-based security system with different levels of access set by the administrators. The "non-publisher" can create and edit press releases, the "publisher" approves or denies them and the "administrator" has super user access to do anything he/she wants, along with the ability to manage user accounts, grant access to certain roles, set permissions and remove any published press releases.

The application consists of an Intranet based Content Management System for entering the Press Releases and uses FCKEditor's WYSIWYG tools for rich content editing. The system contains a scheduler for automated publishing based on the author's predefined date/time and many more features like internal and external media contacts per release.

I could write a lot more about the application and its features but it's time for me to sleep! It's almost 3AM - whoa!

Check out the application here if you're interested: http://press.qwestapps.com/

* Things stated are my opinions and not those of my employer. It is also possible that what I've written about will have changed by time you've read this and visited the site. Feel free to leave me any feedback!

-JD