Implementing and running Joomla at a large South African university
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Transcript of Implementing and running Joomla at a large South African university
Joomla! at a large South African university
Lovemore Nalube University Web Developer
www.cput.ac.za
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
CMSs at SA universities
• Joomla! (CPUT), • Drupal (ex-UFH, NWU, UCT), • Microsoft Sharepoint (UWC, UFH,
Stellenbosch) • Proprietary (Rhodes)
History with Joomla! CMS
• Pre-2010 = custom PHP based CMS, • 2010 – April 2013 = Joomla! 1.5 • May 2013 – present = Joomla! 2.5
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!,
Joomla! 1.5 deliverables
• 6 templates, • 20 to 30
“main menus” made,
• 100 “submenus” made,
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.
Result:
• 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
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.
FYI: Search Engine metadata
Ever wondered why some Google results look funky? eg:
vs
Answer: Semantics. Read more by googling: “Google Rich snippets”
Optimizing: Supporting files
Combine CSS, JS and image files as much as possible • Reduce request and response hits
97
35
Before After
Number of files loaded for homepage
Optimizing: Page size
Compress your images and files
0 0,5
1 1,5
2 2,5
3 3,5
4
MB
Size of the homepage
Reverse proxy Apache with Nginx
YOU
Optimizing: Caching on the server
Enable caching in PHP. Memecache and APC
Optimizing: Serving static files
Apache is good for processing PHP Apache is BAD for CSS, JS and images Enter: NGINX
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:
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
Mobile app integration
• Varsity mobile hybrid app
• JSON remote feeds • Events • News
Problems
• Load balancing with front end editing, • Some rich snippets do not show up on Google, • Moving scripts to bottom of page,
Thanks