I'm an experienced .NET developer, but brand new to Umbraco. I'm in the process of setting up a new site which is likely to become very large (there will be new content being produced at the rate of around 20 pages a day). Rather than regret my mistakes later, I thought I'd go out to you guys for tips as to how to keep this manageable and performant as the site grows?
I'm considering using a structure along blog lines, so year\month\day\article-name type structure, within the CMS, and then having category pages that will pull out entries associated with them.
Will that kind of approach work? Any advice would be very much appreciated
Your approach would work out pretty well. It's indeed best practice to start thinking about your content structure up front, and using a well designed folder structure is a great start. Amount of pages is not really relevant here, as umbraco can serve zillions of pages (you're rather limited by the hardware setup (memory allocation, ...)). Also have a look at the available packages in the project section, which may simplify editor's work as to creating those folders (eg. AutoFolders project by Chris Koiak could be a real time saver)
Let us know what you decide and how it goes and feel free to ask more questions when moving along.
We are using a Umbraco v4 site with around 12.000 articles and 1.000.000 pageviews a month. Two quick tips: - Use the blog package, year\month\day\article-name structure. - If you have a lot of pageviews and a lot of content look carefully at optimizing and caching of your macros. - Check server capacity, make sure you have enough memory (our site is using around 500mb for the w3wp.exe process and 1gb for the SQL server process).
Thanks for the info and the welcome! It's sitting on a fairly beefy server so will have plenty of RAM available - though we're hoping to hit the 1 million page view mark pretty quick. Still wrapping my head around some of the XSLT bits but will let you know how I get on!
Tom - do you have any links with regards to optimizing/caching the macros that are being used?
Check through all the config files in umbraco and try to make sure you understand them as they give you some interesting options. Also you can control caching and bits. Like all large sites you might want to start from the ground up, Hardware, Database options like splitting the tables across different disks, where you tmp tables are on the disks. Make sure you config and look at the options in your app pool in IIS I have all my site. All standard stuff I am sure you are aware of. Check you perf on XLTS stuff, you can write some of the stuff in usercontrols which might give you some better caching options depends what you are doing. Big thing to think about is how you are going to archive and delete stuff in the long run as a good archive strategy might save you more in terms of perfomance in the long run. i.e I am going to run this stuff off into archive site or out cms management altogther.
If you haven't already done so, you should check out the Umbraco TV videos. At 19 Eur. a month it's a steal. I found that a lot of the problems / tasks i had in the beginning was explained in a way directly usable for me, and the videos flattend the learning curve substantially.
If you are .net experienced you will love the videos on creating user controls for Umbraco and doing stuff with data programatically.
Best Practice for setting up large site in Umbraco
Hi guys,
I'm an experienced .NET developer, but brand new to Umbraco. I'm in the process of setting up a new site which is likely to become very large (there will be new content being produced at the rate of around 20 pages a day). Rather than regret my mistakes later, I thought I'd go out to you guys for tips as to how to keep this manageable and performant as the site grows?
I'm considering using a structure along blog lines, so year\month\day\article-name type structure, within the CMS, and then having category pages that will pull out entries associated with them.
Will that kind of approach work? Any advice would be very much appreciated
James
Hi James,
Your approach would work out pretty well. It's indeed best practice to start thinking about your content structure up front, and using a well designed folder structure is a great start. Amount of pages is not really relevant here, as umbraco can serve zillions of pages (you're rather limited by the hardware setup (memory allocation, ...)). Also have a look at the available packages in the project section, which may simplify editor's work as to creating those folders (eg. AutoFolders project by Chris Koiak could be a real time saver)
Let us know what you decide and how it goes and feel free to ask more questions when moving along.
Btw: welcome to the umbraco community.
Cheers,
/Dirk
We are using a Umbraco v4 site with around 12.000 articles and 1.000.000 pageviews a month.
Two quick tips:
- Use the blog package, year\month\day\article-name structure.
- If you have a lot of pageviews and a lot of content look carefully at optimizing and caching of your macros.
- Check server capacity, make sure you have enough memory (our site is using around 500mb for the w3wp.exe process and 1gb for the SQL server process).
Hi Tom, Dirk,
Thanks for the info and the welcome! It's sitting on a fairly beefy server so will have plenty of RAM available - though we're hoping to hit the 1 million page view mark pretty quick. Still wrapping my head around some of the XSLT bits but will let you know how I get on!
Tom - do you have any links with regards to optimizing/caching the macros that are being used?
Many thanks
James
Check through all the config files in umbraco and try to make sure you understand them as they give you some interesting options. Also you can control caching and bits. Like all large sites you might want to start from the ground up, Hardware, Database options like splitting the tables across different disks, where you tmp tables are on the disks. Make sure you config and look at the options in your app pool in IIS I have all my site. All standard stuff I am sure you are aware of. Check you perf on XLTS stuff, you can write some of the stuff in usercontrols which might give you some better caching options depends what you are doing. Big thing to think about is how you are going to archive and delete stuff in the long run as a good archive strategy might save you more in terms of perfomance in the long run. i.e I am going to run this stuff off into archive site or out cms management altogther.
Good luck,
James
James!
If you haven't already done so, you should check out the Umbraco TV videos. At 19 Eur. a month it's a steal. I found that a lot of the problems / tasks i had in the beginning was explained in a way directly usable for me, and the videos flattend the learning curve substantially.
If you are .net experienced you will love the videos on creating user controls for Umbraco and doing stuff with data programatically.
Mikael
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