Solutions: content management, custom applications
Verticals: government

The International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) engaged Fig Leaf Software to help it convert its pre-existing website developed using Macromedia Spectra over to Paperthin's CommonSpot Content Server. Some of the challenges included the following:

• Create a scalable infrastructure to support the largest ColdFusion-based website (490K+ pages) ever constructed (based on Macromedia's records)
• Support 690 million hits per month generated by 2.4 million unique monthly visitors with plenty of room to grow.
• Accurately converting hundreds of thousands of content items from their Spectra-based schema over to CommonSpot
• Architecting a high-availability clustered system that allows for hundreds of pieces of new content to be added daily with 100% uptime
• Customizing the CommonSpot user interface to give the IBB content owners a streamlined authoring experience to reduce learning curve and reduce publishing times
• Adapting CommonSpot to support 44 different languages including English, Chinese, Greek, and Persian
• Allowing content contributors to import content from one language bureau into another (i.e. allowing an author from the Chinese bureau to import an article written for the English bureau) 
• Allow for the dynamic web-based editing of images in order to add credit stamps and attribution to the Associated Press
• Support tens of thousands of media assets including RealAudio, RealVideo, and MP3
• Syndicate content via XML (RSS)
• Support a hierarchical classification scheme consisting of 1400+ categories and keywords nested ten levels deep
• Provide the ability to automatically cross-reference documents based on metadata
• Deploy Microsoft SQL Server Full-Text searching for proximity and other advanced searches

 

Developers at Fig Leaf Software worked closely with Paperthin, Inc., the developers of the CommonSpot Content Server, to enable it to support the Unicode (UTF-8) character set that enables publishing into nearly every written language on the planet.  Fig Leaf also developed several custom extensions to support advanced metadata classification, WYSIWYG content syndication ("SiteRipper"), advanced multimedia support, content cross-referencing, localization, page creation, and searching.

This project has entered the deployment phase.  The English site launched in October, 2004 -- two weeks prior to the U.S. election.  During the election, the site encountered nearly three times the amount of normal daily traffic without skipping a beat.  Since then, deployment of the additional 44 language site "clones" continue at a rate of two per week.  The sites have recieved "Bobby" Certification and are fully 508 Compliant.

Some of the launched sites include the following:

Albanian, Bangla, Burmese, Central Africa, Chinese, Creole, Croatian, English, Greek, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Special English, Tibetan, Turkish, Urdu, US Policy, Uzbek, and Vietnamese

Post-launch, the International Broadcasting Bureau entered into a long-term support contract with Fig Leaf to provide architectural reviews, training, 24x7 programming support, and additional site development on an as-needed basis.