[OT] Pool on CMS usage

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Mon Oct 24 12:08:21 EDT 2011


Andre Garzia wrote:
> This is OT and not directly related to LiveCode. I would like to know how
> many of you guys are using a CMS on your own websites and what CMS are you
> guys using. I want to see how many of you built your own tools and how many
> are using common available packages such as wordpress, drupal, etc. This is
> just me trying to get some sense of how you guys are doing. To avoid
> flooding the list, those interest in answering can please reply to my
> personal email.

It's kinda OT but at the same time very much relates to a lot of what we 
all need to do, since when we're not using LC to drive our web sites 
we're making web sites to drive sales of our LC-based products.  So I 
hope no one minds, but I'm submitting my reply here:


I have clients and customers who use a wide range of CMSes, including 
Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress and others.  I've been impressed with each of 
them in various ways, esp. Drupal, but I've noticed something about 
them:  sooner or later (and in the case of Drupal and Joomla it's 
definitely "sooner") they need to hire a consultant to tailor them.

Reflecting on this, and on the needs I have for my own current sites and 
sites in development, I've been researching alternative ways of doing 
things.  Of course, these involve LiveCode.

Here's an interesting statistic from livecodejournal.com, where I've 
started adding a forum powered by PHPBB, and have long had a blog there 
powered by LiveCode - this is from the server's process logs:

Process               user   machine  average
php5.cgi           99.134%    0.072%    0.715
irv.cgi             0.866%    0.001%    0.002

Note that php5.cgi is what's running the forum, and that the forum 
hasn't even officially gone "live" yet, so the only traffic is Ken and I 
doing setup stuff and spammers trying to create accounts and me logging 
in to block their IPs.

Meanwhile, irv.cgi is the LiveCode-based CGI I used to drive the public 
blog, which gets significantly more traffic.

The upside for both is that even on a shared server, their loads are 
well below any limits that would require migrating to a dedicated 
machine or even a VPS.  So far so good.

But look at the difference in performance!  The seldom-used PHP-based 
forum is consuming hundreds of times more CPU cycles than the public 
blog.  I've omitted the hit counts from the stats above, but I can say 
that the blog gets almost four times as many hits as the forum - and yet 
still consumes a fractions of total CPU time!

In all fairness, the difference between the two systems is that PHPBB 
simply does more work.

But that's the point:    How much work does a system need to do?

We could rephrase that:  How much can it do that I'll never use?

Or more to the point:  If I write a CMS that does only what I need it to 
do, how many orders of magnitude more efficient will it be relative to 
Joomla, Drupal, etc?



Last year on this list I made what turned out to be a premature 
reference to a system I call RevCloud, a set of developer services which 
will be available through RevNet.   Those are still in development, and 
Chipp's open sourcing of Magic Carpet will play a role in it, but with 
various client commitments its still uncertain when I'll have time to 
roll it out for you folks.

But in the meantime, the lightweight and flexible data store I came up 
with for its backend is finding its way into a number of projects here. 
  I call it "Document Chunkadelic", or "dChunk" for short, and it's 
inspired by the simplicity of document-based data stores like Mongo and 
CouchDB but very slim, trimmed down to be optimized for short-runtime 
uses like CGIs.

Working with dChunk in recent months, in conjunction with the 
performance tests I've been doing on my servers, has prompted me to 
abandon my work learning Drupal and put my energy into making a new, 
much simpler CMS based on LiveCode.

This is still very much in development, and I'm not certain how much 
time I'll be able to put into productizing it for use by others, but 
with the four-dozen domains I manage and all the flexibility of LiveCode 
under the hood, even if it's never used by anyone other than myself and 
a couple of clients it'll pay for itself many times over.


So I think there's a very strong message here with regard to RevServer 
and CMSes:  even if you roll your own, you can probably get more done 
with less system load than using nearly anything else.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  LiveCode Journal blog: http://LiveCodejournal.com/blog.irv




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