archstl

In early 2009, it was determined that the Archdiocese of Saint Louis needed to upgrade its website, mostly for security concerns. After investigating a move from Joomla 1.0.x to Joomla 1.5.x, the Archdiocese determined it would be more cost effective and a more future proof decision to migrate the over 49 individual Joomla sites that comprised www.archstl.org into a single Drupal installation.

This upgrade/migration provides many benefits, not the least of which are a better end-user experience, a better administrative experience, and much improved page load and search indexing performance. In addition, Drupal's structure and content presentation provide much greater flexibility in design and information structure, as well as SEO (search engine optimization) than other popular CMS frameworks that were investigated.

The decision was made early on to partner with a development company that would help with the content migration and initial site buildout. Theming would be done in-house. We chose to partner with Palantir.net, a web development company located in Chicago, IL. After Palantir completed initial site work, I went up to meet them, and also attended my first DrupalCamp (Chicago); Chicago has a much more vibrant Drupal community than St. Louis... but perhaps that will change at some point!

After nearly a year's worth of planning and development, the Archdiocese launched its upgraded website on February 22, 2010. Continue Reading »

One of the main new features of the Archdiocese of Saint Louis' website (to launch on February 22!) is the much-improved parish and school searching capabilities. There are many facets to these sections of the site; everything is built using the combination of nodes built with CCK, Views, and Mapstraction (for Google Map interfaces).

One of the main annoyances with most implementations of parish and school searching that I've found (and I've tested almost every U.S. Archdiocese's website for this functionality) is the fact that searches are extremely rigid - if you don't type in the exact terms for the title of the parish in the parish database, you won't get any results.

For instance, type in "St. Luke," and you might get a result for St. Luke parish. However, type in "Saint Luke," and you get nothing. Or, what if you type in "Saints Joachim and Anne," but the parish is in the database as "Sts. Joachim & Anne"? Continue Reading »

Recently, I've been tracking visits on two of the larger Archdiocesan websites on our Archdiocesan web server, and I found an interesting anomaly (one that I had thought was odd earlier, but didn't really have hard numbers to decipher it until more recently). Check out the hits (a 'hit' is a file downloaded from the web server to a computer) for the entire www.archstl.org domain:

Hits for Archstl.org and StLouisReview.com:

173,000 hits on archstl.org vs. 44,000 hits on the St. Louis Review website.

Sounds reasonable, right? After all, the Archdiocesan website incorporates over 49 different 'subsites' - for education, cemeteries, the missions, the Catholic Youth Apostolate, etc. There are about 4 hits on archstl.org to every hit on the Review site.

So, you would expect that the number of visitors would be proportionate, no?

Visitors for Archstl.org and StLouisReview.com:

Woah! Wait a second... the Archdiocesan site had four times the number of hits—how does it have only 75% of the visitors of the Review site?

The problem here is a highly unoptimized site structure and file system, which, in high-traffic conditions, could (and, in fact, did, a couple times) bring a web server to its knees.

Right now, on www.archstl.org, each of the 49 subsites has its own template folder, with its own images and template files. This means that if you go to www.archstl.org, then click on a link to www.archstl.org/education, you're basically going to an entirely different website (in terms of file structure, and you have to re-download the entire template, and all the files...

Nevermind simply following YSlow's suggestions and optimizing file etags/gzip! If the same file is accessed at /templates/archstl/image.png and /education/templates/archstl/image.png, it has to be downloaded twice.

We're working on remedying this situation, but it's a good idea to keep tabs on these kinds of stats, just to make sure you know where potential site performance problems lie.

If two or three of the sites on www.archstl.org had a large volume of visitors in a matter of minutes, the server would go down in flames. Luckily, this has only happened once (and we responded pretty quickly), but in my mind, our infrastructure, site design, and filesystem should take performance into account.