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Welcome to the wiki page for TIME's editorial engineering framework. Here's a good order in which to read the pages after you scan the scintillating discussion below. Each page links to the next one.
- Getting Started
- Development
- Parameters and Convenience Methods
- Previewing and Deploying
- Safety First!
This repository provides both a command-line script for generating new projects and a client-side script with a few convenience functions.
Newsroom apps need to be decoupled from the content management system and the current page environment so that they stand the greatest chance of surviving future changes and CMS migrations. At the same time, they need to be good DOM citizens when running in an article page without an <iframe>'s prophylactic embrace. Bundling apps allows us to enclose everything the app needs to survive in one file that can run either inside a Time.com page or on its own via the bare-bones embed.html that accompanies each new app generated with this module.
To that end, our interactives at Time are developed independently from the CMS and bundled into self-assembling Javascript files using Webpack. They are both discrete—requiring no dependencies, and discreet—interfering as little as possible with the rest of the page (usually not at all).
Many editorial interactive projects fail on the power of their complexity. At TIME, we believe that the first thing the reader sees has an obvious purpose and message, even if it allows for extensive further engagement. This is known as the "EULER Principle":
Easily
Understood by the
Least
Engaged
Reader
When an interactive data visualization is paired with written analysis, the user should be able to recreate all of the author's assertions in the interactive itself. The author should not have access to tools or information that the user does not.
For example, if the text states that "cases have gone up 23 percentage points since the law went into effect," that statement should be visually obvious or easily surfaced in the visualization of said cases.
This is an aspirational rule that has been violated many times by its author, Chris Wilson.
- Chris Wilson (@wilson428)
Next: Getting Started