Implementing and running Joomla at a large South African university
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This document discusses the implementation and management of Joomla! as the content management system (CMS) for a large South African university, detailing its history and migration from custom PHP to Joomla! 1.5 and subsequently to 2.5. It covers the costs, time, and deliverables associated with the migration process, as well as optimization techniques for performance and security. Additionally, it highlights challenges faced, such as load balancing and visibility of rich snippets in Google search results.
Implementing and running Joomla at a large South African university
- 1. Joomla! at a large South African university Lovemore Nalube University Web Developer www.cput.ac.za
- 2. About our university • • • • URL: www.cput.ac.za Number of staff and students: 40 000, Largest university in the Western Cape, Result of a merger with more than 8 colleges and technikons, • 30 000 visits per day
- 3. CMSs at SA universities • Joomla! (CPUT), • Drupal (ex-UFH, NWU, UCT), • Microsoft Sharepoint (UWC, UFH, Stellenbosch) • Proprietary (Rhodes)
- 4. History with Joomla! CMS • Pre-2010 = custom PHP based CMS, • 2010 – April 2013 = Joomla! 1.5 • May 2013 – present = Joomla! 2.5
- 5. Getting onto Joomla! 1.5 • • • • Money spent on a template = R50 000, Time = 1 year, Skills = outsourced, Manual copy-paste from PHP CMS into Joomla!,
- 6. Joomla! 1.5 deliverables • 6 templates, • 20 to 30 “main menus” made, • 100 “submenus” made,
- 7. Migration to 2.5 Time: 4 months, People: 3 (Web Editor + 2 developers), Cost: less than R1 000, Migration procedure Article migration with J2XML, Rebuilt: Menus, modules, plugins.
- 8. Result:
- 9. • 3 menus only, • Subversion for code versioning Extensions • Security: RSFirewall!, • Moderation: Article Factory Manager, • News: K2, • Clickable telephone numbers: Re-replacer, • Events management: RSEvents!, • Electronic forms: RSForm! • Logging: User audit, • Custom code: Sourcerer, • Embedding: Modules Anywhere, • Module Manager: Advanced Module Manager
- 10. Template system • Joomlart T3 template Why? • One template for whole site, • ‘themes’ for various faculties, • CSS and JS combining and compressing, • Caching system, • Already responsive.
- 11. FYI: Search Engine metadata Ever wondered why some Google results look funky? eg: vs Answer: Semantics. Read more by googling: “Google Rich snippets”
- 12. Optimizing: Supporting files Combine CSS, JS and image files as much as possible • Reduce request and response hits Number of files loaded for homepage 97 35 Before After
- 13. Optimizing: Page size Compress your images and files MB Size of the homepage 4 3,5 3 2,5 2 1,5 1 0,5 0
- 14. Reverse proxy Apache with Nginx YOU
- 15. Optimizing: Caching on the server Enable caching in PHP. Memecache and APC
- 16. Optimizing: Serving static files Apache is good for processing PHP Apache is BAD for CSS, JS and images Enter: NGINX
- 17. Optimizing: Security and SSL Always use SSL when users must login • GoDaddy Wildcard certificate = R1 000 per annum • Verisign Wildcard certificate = R20 000 per annum Joomla RSFirewall module:
- 18. Monitoring: Graphs and Alerts Google Analytics • Visitors, Search Engines, etc… SNMP and Cacti • Server, Apache, MySql, PHP, custom variables Off-Campus monitoring • Free: uptimerobot.com
- 19. Mobile app integration • Varsity mobile hybrid app • JSON remote feeds • Events • News
- 20. Problems • Load balancing with front end editing, • Some rich snippets do not show up on Google, • Moving scripts to bottom of page,
- 21. Thanks