Kineticode and Radio Free Asia Launch Bricolage-Powered Site

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Multilanguage support a boon to busy international news site

Kineticode and Radio Free Asia (www.rfa.org) today announced the launch of the newly designed Radio Free Asia Website powered by the Bricolage content management system. Leveraging the comprehensive multilingual and workflow capabilities of Bricolage, the international news organization has successfully launched its new site in ten different languages.

We’re pleased with our Bricolage implementation, said Hal Creech, RFA’s director of program delivery. By far, our most important criterion was for a content management system able to support multiple languages in multiple character sets and with varying font requirements. Kineticode’s implementation for RFA has delivered.

Funded by Congress with a mandate to broadcast exhaustive, unbiased news to Asian countries that lack free media, Radio Free Asia sought a CMS that was flexible enough to manage and publish content not only in languages such as English, Cantonese, and Korean, but also less widespread languages such as Uyghur and Khmer. Thanks to its core support for managing content in Unicode, as well as its ability to convert to other character sets on the fly, Bricolage delivered a compelling, complete solution that met all of RFA’s multilingual needs.

Joshua Edelstein, RFA Webmaster, also highlighted Bricolage’s scalability and workflow processes. The Bricolage workflow support has enabled us to add more professional review of content, said Edelstein. The flexible and powerful templating allows for easier design modifications and the preview functionality prevents the publication of mistakes to the main site. This power enabled us to take advantage of the workflow features, allowing more people to contribute content to the site without losing control over editorial or interface integrity.

Kineticode worked closely with RFA to complete the successful migration to Bricolage. The collaboration was carried out through the planning, implementation, and launch stages. With over 150,000 existing articles and a publishing schedule of 100 new stories per day, plus a number of photographs and approximately 60 supporting audio files from the radio broadcasts, the RFA Website provides a huge resource of news and information to east and southeast Asia. Bricolage manages the demands of such a busy environment with ease, says Edelstein.

The launch of the Bricolage-powered Radio Free Asia site is a huge success for Bricolage and Kineticode said David Wheeler, president of Kineticode. The amazing support not only for multiple languages and character sets, but also for publishing them all to the accessible, standards-compliant format of semantic XHTML is a win for RFA readers worldwide. It truly is a showcase example for the project, and Kineticode is extremely pleased to have been able to help make it happen.

Kineticode and RFA plan to continue their collaboration to help the RFA Website grow in the future and to promote continued improvements to Bricolage.

About Kineticode, Inc.

Kineticode, Inc. (www.kineticode.com) is the leading provider of services for the Bricolage content management system. Founded by Bricolage lead architect and developer David Wheeler, Kineticode provides planning, implementation, development, and support services to customers as diverse as Portugal Telecom, The RAND Corporation, and Mac Publishing.

Radio Free Asia

Radio Free Asia (www.rfa.org) is a private, nonprofit corporation that broadcasts news and information to listeners in Asian countries where full, accurate, and timely news reports are unavailable.

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Kineticode is a service mark of Kineticode, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.