UMBRACO CMS Building Scalable Websites Matthew Brumpton UK Data Archive 17 April 2014
Overview of today s talk UK Data Archive and UK Data Service What is Umbraco? UKDA Umbraco websites Responsive design What is a scalable website? When to scale? Using Umbraco to scale your website Know your limits! Any Questions? 2
UK Data Archive based at the University of Essex since 1967 curator of the UK s largest collection of digital data in the social sciences currently holds nearly 6,000 data collections for research and teaching, both quantitative and qualitative certified to ISO 27001, the international information security standard makes these available via the new UK Data Service Website: www.data-archive.ac.uk 3
UK Data Service the UK Data Service indexes all data collections in the Archive all catalogued at thematic level many indexed at variable level also harvests metadata from other sources all are available for download via Discover search-and-browse catalogue: discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk 4
UK Data Service led by experts at University of Essex along with colleagues at Manchester, Leeds, Southampton, Edinburgh and UCL also provides access to UK Census data (1971 to 2011) source of guidance, training, and support for data users in UK and around the world currently serve approx. 24,000 registered users newly funded to coordinate the Administrative Data Research Network, part of UK s Big Data strategy Websites: ukdataservice.ac.uk, census.ukdataservice.ac.uk 5
What is Umbraco? Open source CMS.NET 4.5 Web Application written in C# and SQL 10+ years old with a large active community Over 110,000 active installations Current version is 7.1 MVC / AngularJS support Benefits: Built on Microsoft technologies Large community 55,000+ registered users and developers Active release cycle (Major release every 2-3 months) User friendly management interface (The Back Office) API for developers No licensing costs (Paid support if required) Easy to setup - http://umbraco.codeplex.com/ (IIS), Visual Studio (NuGet) Transparent development process Challenges: Open source (Version 5) Investment to up-skill 6
Our Umbraco Websites UK Data Archive http://data-archive.ac.uk/ http://relu.data-archive.ac.uk/ UK Data Service Site launched 2013 1000+ pages 60,000+ visits a month Version 6.1.6 35+ Content authors http://ukdataservice.ac.uk/ http://census.ukdataservice.ac.uk/ http://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/ http://blog.ukdataservice.ac.uk/ http://elsst.ukdataservice.ac.uk/ Administrative Resource Network Launched planned May 27 th 2014 7
Responsive design Supports a wide range of browsers and devices Twitter Bootstrap - Grid system and responsive design Modernizer - Feature detection How to test: Chrome responsive view Firefox responsive view Opera Mobile emulator Warning! Responsive design only hides content Dedicated mobile pages required to reduce load 8
What is a scalable website? Scalability is the ability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work in a capable manner or its ability to be enlarged to accommodate that growth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/scalability Measures of website scalability Load Concurrent users Content Pages Functional Forms, Data feeds, Search Interfaces, etc Administration Increased number of organisations or users Examples of Umbraco sites that have scaled Redball Stratos (14 October 2012) Over 9 million people watched live Wired.co.uk - Over 375,000 pages 9
When to Scale - Increased visitors Pages take a long time to load Server errors (500) Users create load Google analytics for real time reporting and usage stats How many simultaneous users can my site handle? Load UI / JMeter Beware of stress testing on a live server 10
When to Scale - Increased content Users cannot find relevant content Broken links (404 errors) Content going live before it is ready Information Architecture (Taxonomy, Sitemap, User Stories) Content approval workflow Dedicated content management site 11
Scaling content in Umbraco 35 Content authors 5 Content approvers Custom content workflow Dedicated content server Content templates Document Types 12
Scaling functionality in Umbraco Application Separation Reusable code Use the clients CPU to reduce server load Automated testing (Selenium, Total Validator) Load balancing 13
Knowing Umbraco s limits An Umbraco installation can hold 100 s of websites Decouple applications to allow them to individually grow Remove single point of failure Try to avoid multiple brands in a single Umbraco instance discover. census. ellst. hasset. Relu.? Ugeo. Icem. 14
What s next? Umbraco 7 New backoffice (Reduced number of clicks) AngularJS (MVVM) Plugin support 15
Thank you for listening Any questions? 16
Find Out More Find out more Data Archive data-archive.ac.uk UK Data Service ukdataservice.ac.uk Contact Information Matthew Brumpton UK Data Archive Wivenhoe Park, University of Essex Colchester CO4 3SQ E-mail: mbrump@essex.ac.uk 17