The Fiscal Times

The Fiscal Times (www.thefiscaltimes.org ), a limited liability company (LLC) currently funded by Peter G. Peterson, partnered with Oasis to develop a hybrid article and feature-based site that combines the Sitecore content management system with Telligent’s Community Server platform. TFT is a digital news, opinion and media service devoted to comprehensive quality reporting on vital fiscal, budgetary, health care and international economic issues. TFT offers an interesting mix of aggregated articles, in-depth feature coverage, photo and video content along with a fully integrated web community that includes blog pages and articles where site visitors can join in on the fiscal discussion by posting their comments and thoughts.

Oasis was engaged at the beginning of the site planning phase to work with The Fiscal Times design team to ensure that finalized site designs adhered to the established information architecture. Through all iterations of the evolving site design, Oasis provided detailed feedback on the user experience and user interface to ensure that site excelled in both form and function. Following the design phase, Oasis began to develop the site so it could be managed by the Fiscal Times editorial team through the Sitecore CMS while also integrating the community features of Community server for the end user. While developing the site, Oasis understood that the backend CMS interface had to be simple and intuitive to aid the editorial team, who for the most part had very little experience with the web, coming mostly from print publication backgrounds. To ensure the editorial team was comfortable working with the CMS to produce content, Oasis held daily editorial check-ins as well as weekly training sessions to gain feedback on the interface and allow for changes based on user preferences. To simplify the site management, Oasis also built in overrides so a majority of the site would populate content automatically based on content tags, but also allowed for manual overrides if the content editors felt like they needed to promote certain content in-organically on site’s homepage and core issue landing pages.

Realizing that media would help to drive the editorial content, Oasis built flexible page templates for article and core issue landing pages that allowed content editors to insert photos, audio, video and interactive flash application content in page headers as well as within body content. This gives the content editors the flexibility to create ever evolving pages as their content continues to grow and evolve.

While the Sitecore CMS development was aimed at creating a streamlined interface for content updates, the Telligent Community Server integration focused on engaging the site’s visitors. Oasis took a new approach to incorporate blogs and user comments into the site. Instead of building an entirely separate community site, Oasis utilized the Community Server API so it could manage and store comments through community server while handling the front end site presentation and display through the Sitecore CMS. This allows a seamless transition within the site from aggregated and feature articles to blogger content as well as enabling commenting on all article types throughout the site. This also simplified content editors duties as they manage content in one place, the Sitecore CMS, instead of managing two backend environments.

Services Provided

• Discovery Phase
• Information Architecture Consulting
• Rapid Prototype Development
• Design Integration
• XHTML & CSS Development
• Sitecore CMS integration
• Telligent Community Server Integration
• Sitecore and Telligent Editor Training

Project Results

• Launched fully editable and workflow managed site ahead of schedule and on budget
• Delivered immersive site experience leveraging CSS, JavaScript and XHTML
• Received positive user responses from both internal and external site audiences