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Reporter

Service Description

The Cambridge University Reporter is the University's journal of official business and the primary means through which official information and governance-related matters are conveyed by the University to its members and the wider community.

Ordinary issues of the Reporter are published weekly in term time with Special issues published at set times throughout the year.

Service Status

The Reporter site is currently live.

Contact

Technical queries and support should be directed to uis-devops-division@lists.cam.ac.uk and will be picked up by a member of the team working on the service.

Issues discovered in the service or new feature requests should be opened as GitLab issues.

Non-technical and end-user queries relating to pages and content should be directed to one of the following:

The University Draftsman can comment on content issues:

All the pages are processed and maintained by the Reporter Editors:

Environments

The Reporter is currently deployed to the following environments:

Name URL Supporting VMs
Production https://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/2022-23/weekly/
https://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/2022-23/special/		 web-rso-live1.srv.uis.private.cam.ac.uk
web-rso-live2.srv.uis.private.cam.ac.uk
Staging / Development http://dev.admin.internal.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/2022-23/weekly
http://dev.admin.internal.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/2022-23/special		 web-rso-dev1.srv.uis.private.cam.ac.uk

Note: XML source files need to be manually added to development so they can be processed using the xml converter to produce the static html files which are then edited, verified, and then copied to production using various bash scripts located on the development server.

Source code

The Reporter development server website source code can be found on GitLab (under construction).

Notable folders on development and production servers

The XML Converter is located on the development server:

  • web-rso-dev1:/home/webadmin/web/reporter/xml-converter

The website is located on the development and production servers:

  • web-rso-*:/home/webadmin/web/global
  • web-rso-*:/home/webadmin/web/reporter

The scripts are located on the development server:

  • web-rso-dev1:/home/webadmin/scripts

Technologies used

XML Converter

  • Java
  • XML
  • XSLT

Website

  • Apache with ucam_webauth module
  • CGI / Perl
  • HTML, CSS, JS

Operational documentation

The original documentation is no longer available. New documentation will be added here.

Other operational documentation

The Reporter is laid out as a print publication using Adobe InDesign. XML is exported, which this software then processes to produce the corresponding web pages automatically (https://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/2022-23/weekly/ etc.)

There is also an overarching Drupal element (https://www.reporter.admin.cam.ac.uk) which is maintained separately.

All the pages are processed and maintained by the Reporter Editors.

Service Management and tech lead

The service owner for the Reporter is TBA.

The service manager for the Reporter is TBA.

The former tech lead for the Reporter is Andy Batey.

The following engineers have operational experience with the Reporter and are able to respond to support requests or incidents: