Copied to clipboard

Flag this post as spam?

This post will be reported to the moderators as potential spam to be looked at


  • Paul Dermody 31 posts 110 karma points
    Aug 30, 2017 @ 19:15
    Paul Dermody
    6

    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.

  • Laurence Gillian 600 posts 1219 karma points
    Aug 30, 2017 @ 20:21
    Laurence Gillian
    0

    Sounds interesting to me! :-)

  • Brent 29 posts 240 karma points
    Aug 30, 2017 @ 20:35
    Brent
    0

    Interested!

  • Nicholas Westby 2054 posts 7103 karma points c-trib
    Aug 30, 2017 @ 20:52
    Nicholas Westby
    1

    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 :-)

  • Paul Dermody 31 posts 110 karma points
    Aug 31, 2017 @ 16:03
    Paul Dermody
    0

    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!

  • Nicholas Westby 2054 posts 7103 karma points c-trib
    Aug 30, 2017 @ 21:35
    Nicholas Westby
    1

    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.

  • Niels Hartvig 1951 posts 2391 karma points c-trib
    Aug 31, 2017 @ 08:01
    Niels Hartvig
    2

    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...

  • Paul Dermody 31 posts 110 karma points
    Aug 31, 2017 @ 16:08
    Paul Dermody
    0

    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.

  • MuirisOG 382 posts 1284 karma points
    Aug 31, 2017 @ 09:25
    MuirisOG
    0

    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

  • Paul Dermody 31 posts 110 karma points
    Aug 31, 2017 @ 16:32
    Paul Dermody
    1

    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.

    Keep posted and I will share something soon.

    Paul.

  • Paul Griffiths 370 posts 1021 karma points
    Aug 31, 2017 @ 17:10
    Paul Griffiths
    0

    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

  • David Armitage 508 posts 2078 karma points
    Sep 01, 2017 @ 04:27
    David Armitage
    1

    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/

Please Sign in or register to post replies

Write your reply to:

Draft