VRT purchased a Polopoly license to replace the bespoke Content Management System (CMS) for their news web sites, vrtnieuws.net, flandreinfo.be, flandersinfo.be and flanderninfo.be. The same Content Management System is used for Teletext and SMS delivery.

Polopoly is a J2EE application. At VRT, the JBoss application server was used and, for databases, MySQL on development machines and Oracle for production.

The new CMS rationalizes workflow. It provides improved support for journalists and editors, enabling them to work more efficiently.

VRT required the transition from the old CMS to the new CMS to be seamless and invisible to the public. Hence, all old news items had to be migrated from the old to the new system. The sites were migrated in phases over a prolonged period, so software had to be developed that could handle incremental migration and support editors during the cutover period. Legacy data is retrieved directly from the Oracle database and written in the Polopoly content import XML format.

One of the main motivations for using a CMS for teletext is the support for numbering pages. Manually keeping all entries of published articles in overview screens in sync with published page numbers is time consuming and error prone.

VRT news is also available via RSS feeds. These are in turn used by a number of applications such as a news ticker implemented with Ajax.

Reference: Werner Ramaekers