Exclusive sneak preview of M&G Online

The new site is a result of months of planning, research and development stretching back to mid-2007 and conceptualised as far back as 2006 (the first mockups were leaked in early 2008).

According to Matthew Buckland, GM of the M&G Online, the site's many improvements include world-class design, intuitive navigation and a more spacious and sophisticated layout for browsing pleasure. It should also be faster to use. The social media functionality that is part of the new site is a result of months of prototyping on the editorial-controlled multiblog platform Thought Leader, South African blog aggregator Amatomu, and News in Photos sites.

“The people involved in the creation of the new site have worked weekends, public holidays and late into the night. They have survived on beer, pizza and pure passion for the project. The whole M&G Online team - editorial, technical and advertising - came together to make the site work, including (and not listed in any order of beauty): development team: Vincent Maher, Joseph Misika and Tumelo Mphafe; editorial and business team: Matthew Buckland, Riaan Wolmarans, Keith Nicholls, Matthew Burbidge, Nic Haralambous, Valencia Talane, Thembelihle Tshabalala, Zahira Kharsany, Imke van Hoorn and Lisa van Wyk; and online advertising team: Bryan Khumalo, Mamo Moadira and Velly Bosega,” says Buckland.

Key features

Many of the new features will be accessible upon registration, which is free of charge and comes with many benefits. Readers will be able to:

• Save clippings of favourite articles and publish these on their own clippings blogs.
  
• The StoryPredictor suggests articles according to reader interests.
  
• See who is viewing which article on the M&G Online in real time with NewsSwarm.
  
• Enjoy better and centralised management of newsletter subscriptions.
  
• Use advanced article printing functionality.
  
• Add blog and news feeds from other online sources.
  
• Receive special announcements from the M&G Online.
  
• Use the ReadersChoice system to vote for articles or add articles from other sites.
  
• Explore major e-commerce areas: jobs, cars, dating, property and shopping.
  
• View related articles from other news websites.
  
• Comment on all articles and debate with other M&G Online readers.
  
• View a basic video feed of world news from AFP

Other features include:

• The StoryHistory utility will save articles while browsing.
  
• Articles will be integrated with Google Maps.
  
• The beefed-up Zapiro and Madam & Eve cartoon sections will be searchable and tagged.
  
• Advertising formats have been optimised.

Semantic tagging

Tag clouds of subjects, people and places have been included on the home page and news sections, making it easier for readers to find content. Articles, which are regionally organised and can be viewed by country or city, are also tagged with names of cities, countries, companies or organisations, and people. There will also be a new A-Z Topics section that lists subjects covered on the site.

On the technical side, the M&G Online team built its own content management system from the ground up, using PHP5 and MySQL5, on a Fedora Core OS. The site is ‘grinding away' on four dual quad-core servers (32 cores in total, 16 gigabytes of RAM), hosted at Internet Solutions. Frameworks used include J-Query for Ajax; CodeIgnitor is the application framework.

For more:

• Gallery: M&G Online team hard at work

The new Mail & Guardian Online siteclick to enlarge

UPDATE 17 June 17h47: The new site is now live at ww2.mg.co.za.