 "CMS Drives Webdunia's Multilingual Portals")
The rapid growth of Internet and the the growing consumer demand has given rise to a huge pool of information, which needs to be updated at an aggressive rate. To manage this content, a properly designed architecture, referred to as the Content Management System (CMS), is required.
Webdunia, reportedly India’s first Hindi language portal, uses an in-house built CMS to efficiently manage their data and reproduce it as per the reader’s requirements. Nine Indian language portals of Webdunia offers news from the world of politics, sports and human interest stories, Hollywood, life-style, religion, science, IT, etc.
Early foray
“We at Webdunia foresaw the potential of the Indian language portals in the country early and pioneered the launch of Hindi, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam portals in end 1990s. Oriya and Assamese are the two additional languages for which e-mail service is available. Interestingly, for sending an e-mail in any of the 11 languages, the sender does not need a language key board or language software. Nor does the recipient need any language software. Our CMS is so efficient that we always have the best to offer our readers,” explains Pankaj Jain, COO, Webdunia.
Webdunia portal is now available in 5 additional languages - Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Kannada and Punjabi, taking the tally to 9.
The technological architecture
Webdunia Content Management System is based on Windows client server architecture, which can be used for publishing and editing content on a web site. The system uses built-in workflow module to delegate the tasks of content creation and publishing to various users. Built on .NET framework 2.0 (VB.NET), the CMS uses SQL Server 2000 for backend and IIS 6.0 as web server. The portal uses the Crawler based search engine.
Webdunia’s Indic Language Input Component (WIOC) that enables the language efficiency is a JavaScript based component that can be embedded with any web page.
The CMS features Unicode support and architecture, multilingual solution, offline solution, local (intranet) resources like database, web server and client PCs for generating and uploading pages, and template based HTML generation.
Webdunia achieved major technology breakthrough by migrating to Unicode that allows a portal in any of the 9 languages to be accessed on virtually any computer without having to download the language fonts.
The company’s software R&D teams are at work to further strengthen the search engine. This will allow users to search information in their own language on both Webdunia.com and the World Wide Web.
Sharing content with 500 million Indians
With the 9 portals, Webdunia, is expected to address over four-fifth of India’s billion plus population. Given literacy levels of over 60%, this allows Webdunia to share the latest from the world of news, sports, entertainment and astrology with over 500 million Indians in their own language.
Webdunia is undergoing a major makeover in technology and branding to emerge as the country’s largest portal. The company plans to invest over Rs. 25 crore in the next three years on brand building and mass media advertising.
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