We are just finishing up a very large high-profile website built on Umbraco that gets a lot of traffic. We have over 300k nodes which includes about 250k hi-resolution images and 50k content nodes. It took us a year to build and I am very proud of it. The client loves the ease with which they can manage all the content, especially the images that have 20+ crops each.
Given the pain I had to go through to get such a large site running smoothly on Umbraco, I thought that maybe it would be valuable to share some of the design and implementation choices we made and some of the lessons learned.
Would you guys find such insight valuable? Is this the best forum to share it?
Depending on what you're sharing, there are a few venues I would recommend to share via:
Skrift An online magazine that is mostly about Umbraco. If you have an article or multiple articles to share, this is a great place to share, and you can be sure to reach a good number of Umbraco developers.
Umbraco Blog If you've done something truly exception (and it sounds like you may have), the Umbraco core team may be interested in sharing your story as a case study. You will probably get the widest exposure this way.
GitHub If you have code to share, GitHub would be a good place. If it's a library, you might also make it available via NuGet and as an Umbraco package on OUR (this site).
Looking forward to seeing what you've come up with :-)
Thanks for the ideas Nicholas! I will put something together and I think it makes sense to offer it to multiple outlets so these are great links. Thanks!
Thanks Niels. He has already contacted me. But a case study means involving the client more so we gotta see how they feel about that. My main goal is to provide some material for the community to pay everyone back for the help we got while building the site!
Wow, I didn't expect to get so much interest so quickly. Now I have done it - I have to actually go and write up something! Here is a preview:
50,000 content nodes
Easy management of over 250k hi-res images and associated meta data,
taking up over 1TB of space in Azure Cloud Storage
Automatic processing of around 20 crops for every image
Azure Cloud Storage for images
Azure SQL Database for data
Azure CDN for fast delivery and direct downloading of images from CDN (avoiding redirects)
Azure Load Balancer, Availability Sets, and Traffic Manager for
availability
Interface with MS Dynamics to keep back-end changes to
some content in sync with website
Fast searches using Examine/Lucene
Online store using Merchello
User registration for simple social tools
Secure and automatic single sign-on and redirection to external
website
Mechanism for running and managing background batch processes
Support for multiple languages
RESTful APIs for accessing content for third parties and media chains
Excellent mobile and tablet support
Support for vanity URLs for featured content
Of course, no website is perfect and improvements can still be made but my hope is that a short description of how we did everything with appropriate references will help others starting their own sites or struggling with some of the same issues we did.
There's some lessons to be learned here if you haven't bothered to watch much of Umbraco TV or if you haven't yet figured out Umbraco's Anti Patterns the hard way
I've been guilty of a few in the past which have caused some headaches
Very large website - lessons learned
Hi all.
We are just finishing up a very large high-profile website built on Umbraco that gets a lot of traffic. We have over 300k nodes which includes about 250k hi-resolution images and 50k content nodes. It took us a year to build and I am very proud of it. The client loves the ease with which they can manage all the content, especially the images that have 20+ crops each.
Given the pain I had to go through to get such a large site running smoothly on Umbraco, I thought that maybe it would be valuable to share some of the design and implementation choices we made and some of the lessons learned.
Would you guys find such insight valuable? Is this the best forum to share it?
Paul.
Sounds interesting to me! :-)
Interested!
Depending on what you're sharing, there are a few venues I would recommend to share via:
Looking forward to seeing what you've come up with :-)
Thanks for the ideas Nicholas! I will put something together and I think it makes sense to offer it to multiple outlets so these are great links. Thanks!
BTW, I just thought of something. If you want to add some articles to my website, I'd be very much interested: https://code101.net/
Reach out to me here if that sounds like something you'd want to do: http://www.nicholaswestby.com/contact/
It's backed by Medium, so I think you can just write the article on Medium, then you can pass it off to me for inclusion in my domain.
Hi Paul!
h5yr!
This sounds ideal for a case study. I'll get our friendly CoMa (communication and online marketing astronauts) people to reach out to you!
Best,
Niels...
Thanks Niels. He has already contacted me. But a case study means involving the client more so we gotta see how they feel about that. My main goal is to provide some material for the community to pay everyone back for the help we got while building the site!
Paul.
Paul
This would be excellent, as we've just been through a very similar process.
I would be very interested to read about your experience.
Please let us know when you have completed the documentation and where we can find it.
Many thanks
Muiris
Wow, I didn't expect to get so much interest so quickly. Now I have done it - I have to actually go and write up something! Here is a preview:
Of course, no website is perfect and improvements can still be made but my hope is that a short description of how we did everything with appropriate references will help others starting their own sites or struggling with some of the same issues we did.
Keep posted and I will share something soon.
Paul.
Hi Paul,
It's always great to see what others are doing and how they are doing it.
I'd definitely look forward to reading through your summaries.
Paul
Hi Guys,
There's some lessons to be learned here if you haven't bothered to watch much of Umbraco TV or if you haven't yet figured out Umbraco's Anti Patterns the hard way
I've been guilty of a few in the past which have caused some headaches
https://vimeo.com/183623104
I also find this link quite useful about the best and worst ways to query data. I often reference back to this.
http://skrift.io/articles/archive/testing-the-performance-of-querying-umbraco/
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