PTK

Tech Overview
- Publishing pipeline. What happens when you click "publish"
  - Requirements to publish.
    - Body text not empty.
    - Valid Headline.
    - Unique Slug.
    - Valid classification for Obsessed.
  - Scheduled Posts.
- Cron Jobs
  - Apple News Publisher
    - Every 3 minutes
  - Scheduled Post Publisher
  - Newsletter Pipeline
  - Progressive Scroll List
  - Unlock and Bump
  - Sitemap
- UI
  - Recent upgrade to parcel 2.
  - True SPA
Requirements
- Newsroom
  - Always able to publish.
    - Securely and quickly delivering the news.
- Performance
  - Live to users within 60 seconds of publish action in PTK.
- Legal & Auditability
  - Must be possible to detemine whoe made each change to an article
    - Body text
    - Metadata
    - Conversion cards
    - Images and video
    - Listed Authors
    - Listed Editors
    - Short link
    - Tags
  - Don't save more data than needed (e.g. temporary autosaves).
  - Needed: precise data retention policy?
- Security
  - Azure/IAC auth.
  - Slack login possible?
  - Bad actors.
- Personas
  - Reporters
  - Editors
  - Engineering/Admin
  - Business

Common Support Issues

Azure login issues.
Slug Redirects.
"Red Dot" Issues.
Data Requests.

Issues

Frequent risky support tasks.
Poor interaction between engineering and newsroom
- Every engineer should shadow a writer as they try to post a story.
- Direct facetime with writers is important to connect to the work.
Impossible to enforce downtime.
- Obsessed Launch
Access Controls.
- Secret routes@katie Access to dynamic nav
Confusing publishing pipeline

Newsroom Issues

Incomplete Saves (@danika)

As described by the newsroom, PTK is "eating words" in article bodies.

This can happen when writing out a headline: it seems like "if you save it too quickly after you're done typing, it won't save the latest version." (@danika)

Eng Notes: This is likely due to the autosave features interacting poorly with the case that multiple writers are working on a story simultaneouly.

TODO:

Reproduce this error under controlled conditions.

Curly Quotes (@danika)

Curly Quotes are required by the TDB style guide, but quite difficult to insert into our WYSIWYG editor. Writers have to use keystrokes.

Article Search in Workflow

@tracy
- "[when inserting fancy links] We only want to link to other articles, and not to other cheats. When you type in a search term, it includes cheat, and express articles along with normal stories. The search results should only include articles."
- "I would prefer that cheats just not populate in the search results."
- "People are accidentally linking to cheats".

Red Dot / Edit Conflicts

@cathy.fenlon:
- Sometimes I'll test when I know someone is in the article and see how long the red dot takes to react. I've noticed a delay. Sometimes I can get in and out before the red dot updates.
- Would be nice to know red dot is precise
- Would be great to be able to kick someone out.
@sam: Any features from other CMSs that handled multiple authors better.
- @tracy: NBC: Total lock on stories. Downside was you can't kick people out.

Odd Requirements to Save Drafts.

@tracy: It's weird that we can't save drafts until we build headlines. Writers often write headlines at the end.

Lost Work.

From the newsroom: Sometimes writers lose stories because they delay saving, not having a headline, and their computer crashes.

Poor Performance in Breaking News Moments.

PTK can show cracks when it's most critical that it work well. During breaking news moments, there is often a flurry of activity in PTK, including multiple people editing and updating the same articles.

Premature/incorrect posts are also a risk, as we publishing amidst a stream of incoming information.

The newsroom reports that during these times, autosave overwrites and

Prior Docs:

Ideas:

@nolawee: Redis-powered leaderboards.
Pull in data from parsely and store in database alongside articles.
Saving should either be autosave always, or explicit.
Ability to send in-app alerts to all PTK users.
Clear visual indication of current environment (prod / stage / pr deploy / local dev)
A smart, reusable article search module.
- Replaces search in home page modules.
- Replaces search in fancy links module.
- Excludes cheats when desired.
Keyboard shortcut to insert empty curly quotes ? Both single and double quotes
An auto-editor which can replace quotes one-by-one with confirmation.
Tool to add Authors
Expose dynamic nav tool to edit:
- Guardrails around design constraints (e.g. total length of nav items).
- Think through analytics concerns if any.
Slack links included in red dot notification - start a convo with author.
Kick authors out of individual articles.
Clearer roles and permissions in PTK.
Clearer messaging is hte best low-effort way to start alleviating issues.
Link to article history.
Search by author
- search by url, slug
- include drafts
- Got a "slug exists" error but couldn't find it because search does not return drafts.
/author pages
- Direct links to slack.
- Show most recent stories.
/activity page
- A realtime view of recent activity on PTK. Who is doing what?
Spike on not requiring headline to save.

Open Questions

@tracy Where do writers and editors spend their time
@tracy Can we drop safari support?
@tracy Does anyone edit from mobile devices?
@lauren Can we deprecate galleries in code.
Are we gathering usage stats e.g. in GA?

Routes

Homepage

Auth

/redirect-logout
/login
/permission

Publishing Articles

/new
/
//body
//main-info
//metadata
//images
/gallery/

Biz Tools

/biztools
/biztools/adstxt
/biztools/brandspartners
/biztools/categorization-data
/biztools/refresh
/biztools/scouted

Editors

/all-articles
/author/
/authors
/category
/cheatsheet
/dynamic-navigation-tool
/homepage
/homepage-analytics
/keywords
/screamer

Obsessed Article Editing

/obsessed/new
/obsessed/
/obsessed//body
/obsessed//main-info
/obsessed//metadata
/obsessed//images
/obsessed//classification
/obsessed/gallery/

Obsessed Admin

/obsessed-tag/
/obsessed-admin
/obsessed-dynamic-navigation-tool
/obsessed-analytics
/obsessed/homepage

Major Libraries

parcel
react
redux
sass
material-ui
apollo / graphql
azure/msal-browser
cloudinary
envkey
eslint
lodash
moment

djtriptych/PTK.md

PTK

TOC