Siren.se is a highly customized Swedish news and content management system. It is used to create, manage and distribute tailored, quality-assured news articles to beneficiaries across Sweden via a news portal.

LiteBreeze built this highly scalable editorial portal using the Laravel framework. A hassle-free notification system for front end users was implemented using Laravel console. The UI is powered by Vue.JS, jQuery and Bootstrap 4.

News management and authoring sections are built with custom components made using Vue.js to ensure rich user experience.

SQL is used as the primary data store backed up with Elasticsearch to enable powerful full-text search. 

The system is built with future scalability demands in mind and hence is backed up by the robust features of AWS. 

Key features

Boolean search: The boolean search implemented in the news page helps the users to combine keywords with operators (or modifiers) such as and, not and or to further produce more relevant results and to extend the search to document text associated with the articles.

Real-time notification: Laravel’s queue system is used to send real-time notifications to subscribers. The queue system helps to defer the time-consuming tasks of sending emails to a large number of users and hence speed up the web requests to the application.

Scheduled notification: Laravel’s command scheduler sends scheduled notifications to the subscribers. The scheduler helps to define our command schedule within the Laravel instead of SSH the CRON entries into the server.

Time zone: The timezone of this application can be configured as required. All time-related data are stored in UTC and the timezone of the application can be altered at any given moment.

Multi-lingual Support: The application supports English and Swedish languages. The user can easily switch the language from the setting.

Technical  information

AWS services: AWS (Amazon Web Service) S3 is used for data storage. A high-performance EC2 instance is used to deliver a hassle-free experience to the end-user.

Coding standards: PSR-2 coding standards are followed in the application to keep the code readable and easily maintainable with proper doc blocks.

Template: AdminLte template built on top of Bootstrap is used in this application for responsive and reusable components.

Database: For better data security and easy backup, Amazon RDS is implemented to configure the MySQL database.

Next priorities

Improved real-time notification: One of the main challenges is to speed up the real-time notification system. As the user base grows, real-time notifications should keep up.

Enhanced and scaled UX: User experience could be further improved by converting the current solutions in jQuery to Vue Js.

Elasticsearch: Updating elasticsearch to its latest version will help improve the search speed and general user experience. 

We trust LiteBreeze with all our web development work in Siren. They developed the archive service for Acta Publica which all Swedish media firms rely on daily. We are excited about ongoing work for Siren and recommend LiteBreeze for their AWS expertise. - Martin Fredriksson