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