Waffles, Beer, and... Polopoly

Belgian media group Cornelio announces Polypoly as their long term partner in providing Web CMS functionality for the company's family of web projects. Polypoly Content Manager will serve as the central platform for the ongoing development of Cornelio's publications in the digital arena.Cornelio operates a group of local and national newspapers in the Dutch-speaking and French-speaking parts of Belgium, and claims to be the largest newspaper publisher in the country. Their media products are diverse: L'Avenir is a collection of regional French-language titles while they also publish Dutch daily's with a national reach, including De Standaard and Het Volk Het. Polopoly is proving increasingly popular among traditional media companies. The company has long-term customers in its native Sweden; and just last month CN Group, a UK publisher based in Cumbria, chose Polopoly to serve as their web platform. The traditional newspaper business brings particular challenges to web cms deployment, and it seems that newspaper publishers are particularly keen to work with products which have been proven to work for other publishers. Reasons cited by Cornelio for picking Polopoly include what it called its:

"...stable and easily scalable web publishing environment, capable of handling a growing number of sites and visitors. Polopoly being based on an open architecture and standards [which] allows easy integration with third party applications and legacy systems was also of importance - as well as the user-friendly work environment for the web editors. Furthermore Polopoly provides the necessary tools to create websites with a high level of personalization and user interactivity."

Ah yes - and this personalization and user interactivity is quite an important point. Not least among Polopoly's attractions is its Community Module, which enables an organization to easily set up revenue-sharing blog structures which will pay readers to set up blogs at the client's domain. Encouraging "Citizen Journalism" in this manner is exactly the kind of thing which the smart newspaper companies of today are looking for: they provide cheap, relevant, popular news and opinion along with helping to integrate the publication yet further into the community which it serves. Polopoly are becoming big players in web cms for media companies, particularly in Europe. And so it is no surprise that they are currently showcasing their products at the "Beyond The Printed Word" media conference, today and tomorrow, in Dublin, Ireland. For more information about Polopoly and their impact on the European media industry, take a visit to the website.