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Portal of the Czech Presidency of the EU

The official website of the Czech Presidency of the EU Council, www.eu2009.cz, was the main means of communication for the Presidency during the first half of 2009. It has been prepared for both Czechs and the public abroad. This website is a pool of important information for the general public, experts and media representatives about the events taking place during the Czech Presidency, about the Czech Republic as the country holding the Presidency, the European Union and its policies and opinions of the Czech Republic about them.

All information is available in three languages – Czech, English and French, and all language versions are equally sized, ie. all content is created and maintained in those languages in parallel. Besides a large volume of text and documents, there is a plenty of multimedia resources, such as photogalleries with print-quality images download, audio recordings, downloadable and streamed video including live broadcasts.

The editorial team consisted of 5 full-time journalists in charge of day-to-day portal updates and three external photographers.

Provided Services

Except of the graphics design that was provided by the Office of the Government, Macron Software delivered all services related to the website development and implementation, namely:

  • Consulting with regards to usability and accessibility of the website, its structure etc.
  • Functionality analysis and specifications, custom component analysis and design
  • Templates coding
  • CMS (WebToDate) delivery and its installation including standard modules as well as development and installation of custom modules.
  • System implementation, i.e. creating templates, structures, styles, navigations, and other WebToDate data components.
  • Design and development of interactive Flash applications – interactive quizzes, etc.
  • Initial testing of functionality, validity and accessibility of the website
  • Application support of the editorial team.

The hardware, infrastructure, connectivity and 24/7 support was provided by Autocont CZ, a.s.

Application

The core module of WebToDate is used for publication of information and documents, files for download, photo galleries, etc. All these information items are automatically linked to their counterparts in other language versions. There is a whole lot of press-releases, news, speeches, announcements and interviews published every day.

The issue of the greatest importance was the calendar of events of the Presidency, where it was stored several thousand various political and cultural events. We used an extension to our standard WebToDate Events module:

  • Very rich events descriptions featuring photo galleries, attachments for download, audio and video presentations, etc.
  • Easy linking of events language versions
  • Advanced events browsing by time criteria
  • Presence of one event in multiple calendars
  • Export to various formats, for example iCalendar

The events calendar is also integrated with external accreditation application with which it regularly synchronizes information in XML format.

As a part of services for media, the presidency regularly publishes a newsletter that is being distributed via e-mail and SMS. The portal provides the registration for the service while the actual SMS distribution is provided by an SMS operator. The necessary data for the SMS service is supplied in XML format. Even this service is provided in all three languages.

Another interactive feature, developed specifically for the portal, is the eCards. The visitors are allowed to send personalized images via the portal by email. The message of the sender is incorporated directly into the image itself.

The website features whole variety of implemented standard WebToDate modules, such as Polls, Full-text search, Recommendation by e-mail, etc. WebToDate XML Import/Export module is then used to create RSS channels or podcasts with speeches and press conferences recordings.

The knowledge of EU is tested by an interactive quiz. While the application interface is developed in Adobe Flash and its ActionScript, the actual quiz scenario and data are defined in XML and the quiz can therefore be easily modified and localized into the multiple languages.

Deployment

The solution is deployed on MS Windows 2003 Server / IIS 6 / PHP 5 platform using MS SQL 2005. To address high demands for availability and performance, the following server farm architecture was used:

  • Database is implemented as a fail-over cluster of two database servers
  • The web servers are three identical machines, while the file system content is replicated to all these three servers.
  • The traffic is load-balanced to all three servers

The access to the administration side of the system is via a secured line with optional VPN connection that is used by external journalists.

Prior to the launch of the site, the infrastructure was extensively stress tested and the server farm configuration fine-tuned to make sure that the solution is capable of safely dealing with the estimated workload especially in its peaks.